(28 April, year 54 AK)
After breaking through the bottleneck that bothered Yuta greatly, his morale had risen quite a lot, and he continued his training being in a much better mood than before.
After a day of rest after his breakthrough, Yuta returned to the training grounds.
'Now that I figured out how to infuse my chakra into the sound waves, according to the records on that sound genjutsu user that Shisui gave me, what I have to do now is to mold my chakra according to the specific genjutsu, but instead of releasing it the usual way, I have to pour all of it into the sound waves and transfer it directly onto my target through the sound.' Yuta analyzed the next steps.
Since the genjutsu that he was most proficient and familiar with is his own original jutsu – Shadow Cloak, Yuta chose it for his next phase of the sound genjutsu training.
Previously, while he was at the hospital, Yuta already modified his jutsu to be able to cast it on himself, and for that purpose, Yuta knew exactly which parts of the jutsu is responsible for the transfer of the chakra onto the target, previously at the hospital Yuta had to either remove or modify those parts to be able to target himself directly with the jutsu.
Being already familiar with the process, Yuta worked on removing the components of his jutsu that are responsible for chakra transfer and targeting in a slightly different way than he did back at the hospital, so the only the parts that are responsible for actually forming the genjutsu remains. After the half a day of trial and error, Yuta finally formed and polished the final working jutsu construct that molded the chakra in a correct way, making it ready to use for casting the Shadow Cloak genjutsu.
'All that is left, is to transfer the genjutsu construct onto the target through the sound.' Yuta thought, 'The only suitable target here is myself, but that shouldn't be a problem. The actual difficulty here is to perform the transferring itself.'
Being already familiar with the process of infusing his chakra into the sound, Yuta performed the shortened hand seals sequence for modified Shadow Cloak genjutsu and focused on controlling his molded chakra in his hands that was formed in the process.
'It's a lot more chakra than I managed to infuse into the sound waves before, and it's not my regular neutral chakra as before, this one is a molded chakra, it's unstable and requires to being constantly controlled and managed or it will deteriorate and dissipate.'
Then Yuta imagined how he would direct the molded chakra into the sound and guide it back onto himself, after that Yuta clapped his hands, pushing the molded chakra into the sound the clap produced.
Next instant, through his chakra senses Yuta noticed how a small part of the molded chakra successfully attached itself to the sound, the sound wave that contained it traveled in all directions and only tiny part of it had hit Yuta, and as it happened, that tiny part of the molded chakra just destabilized and dissipated, unable to influence Yuta's chakra network at all.
As for the rest of the molded chakra in Yuta's hands that was unable to attach itself to the sound, it had dissipated into the air in one puff of smoke.
'Hm, interesting.' Yuta analyzed the results of his first attempt, 'There seems to be a limit of how much chakra I can attach to a one sound wave like that, but I think I could increase it through better chakra control and training. Another thing to work on is the control of the sound wave and the chakra attached to it after it leaves my hands, I need to direct it onto the target or the jutsu won't work. As it happened previously, if chakra will spread in all direction as the normal sound wave does, the part that would actually hit the target would be too little to affect it.'
'Well, this is great so far! I see no major issues with this, I already was able to hit myself with a tiny part of the molded chakra through sound, now I have to work on improving the process, it isn't as difficult and troublesome as the previous part when I had no clue of how to actually attach my chakra to the sound.'
After that thought, with an elated spirit, Yuta continued his training. He proceeds to form the modified version of Shadow Cloak jutsu with as little chakra as possible to not exhaust himself too quickly, then he was trying his best to attach it to the sound through the clap of his hands and direct the sound wave infused with chakra onto himself.
The days flew by while Yuta was engrossed into his new training routine. And since now he was forming a jutsu and then trying to attach it to the sound, he didn't injure his hands anymore like before, since the number of attempts through the day was heavily reduced due to the limited chakra he had to experiment with.
And even with a heavily reduced amount of chakra, much less than the amount that he usually used for this jutsu, it still wasn't that small that he could do it all day after all.
After repeating the three-days cycle for ten times or so, Yuta thought, 'I have managed to increase the amount of chakra I can attach to a one sound wave, but it is still not nearly enough to transfer the entire jutsu in one go, hm, what should I do... I could modify the jutsu to be able to transfer it through multiple sound waves over time and only then activate it on the target, but it doesn't feel right...'
'The records on that sound genjutsu user has mentioned that he was sometimes creating sounds through chakra, producing the clanking sounds of his wooden shoes even when he steps on the soft grass, I probably could do something like that to extend the sound that my clap produces, so it would resound long enough to transfer all the chakra I need, that should work, after working on it so much I have the idea of how to affect the sound itself to prolong it long enough. But the sound will become unnatural and will attract attention, I don't want to give away such an obvious clue to the enemy like that.'
'Instead, I could use some other sound, continuous enough for my purpose, like talking for example... Well, this is a great idea, isn't it? I could form a genjutsu and then transfer it through talking to my enemy. While the enemy would be distracted by the content of my dialogue, I would sneakily attach the molded chakra onto the sound itself and transfer it onto my enemy. I think this has great potential.'
The training continued for another ten cycles or so, while Yuta was working on attaching his jutsu in the form of a molded chakra to the sound of his voice, and from the very beginning it went much better than with claps.
After these ten cycles, with just a one short sentence with two to three words, Yuta was able to pour all of the chakra of a one fully charged Shadow Cloak genjutsu into the sound while doing his best to direct it back onto himself, but he was still struggling with guiding the chakra after it leaves his body and only a small amount of it actually hit Yuta, not nearly enough to affect him.
'Well, I feel like I'm going in the right direction, but the targeting part is still a problem thought.' Yuta thought during one of his breaks, 'Moving the molded chakra from hands to the mouth was not that hard, and attaching it to the sound of me talking is actually easier than doing it through the hands to the sound of a clap, but after that, the sound moves too fast, I have no time to direct it the way I want, what am I doing wrong here?'
...
'Well, if I have no time to direct it when it's already moving, then I have to pre-program its direction before it starts to move.'
After having that idea, Yuta started to develop a completely new part of the jutsu, that would be responsible for directing it after it gets attached to the sound itself.
It was something completely new for Yuta and he immersed himself in it and the days started to fly by quickly. After ten cycles or so, Yuta figured out and produced a working prototype of a jutsu and started integrating it into his Shadow Cloak jutsu, but as he started doing that, now looking back at the problem while being more experienced on the matter, Yuta realized that he doesn't actually need to integrate this new part into his jutsu and overcomplicate it.
'This new jutsu that I developed for controlling the direction of how sound waves with attached chakra would move, I don't actually have to integrate it into my genjutsu, I think. If I train long enough, I think I would be able to use it separately and directly every time I need it, it doesn't require complex chakra molding so I could perform it without the hand seals, directly before releasing my genjutsu into the sound of my voice. Would it actually work?'
...
'I don't see why not, if I do it this way, it would be much more efficient, although to use it on the level I envisioned, it would surely require a lot of practice. But it would be better than overcomplicating each and every genjutsu that I wish to cast through the sound, that's for sure. And who knows, maybe one day I would be able to directly control the sound waves even without it, but that will require a much greater chakra control and reaction that I currently have any hope of achieving.'
With the decision being made, Yuta proceeds to train with his new specialized jutsu that allows him to pre-program the movement of the sound waves. At first, since Yuta wanted to use it without hand seals, it was quite taxing on his chakra control to perform, and at first, it required his full focus for about ten seconds to form the jutsu with chakra control alone without the hand seals' guidance, but when he formed this nameless jutsu and then used it on the sound of his voice and formed the Shadow Cloak jutsu pouring the molded chakra into the sound of his voice, Yuta felt how all the chakra of his jutsu hit him and successfully affected his chakra network through the sound.
'It works!' Yuta thought excitedly, as he observed his own chakra network being successfully affected by his own jutsu, 'Now the only thing left is to train the heck out of it so it will become combat ready, since I won't have ten seconds of concentration whenever I have to use the genjutsu after all.'
'Also, this will be a good starting point to train molding chakra without hand seals, although I already could tell that with my current capabilities, it would be only possible to perform simple jutsus without the hand seals, and it will also require a lot of practice to do it, and what is more important – to do it fast enough.'
--- AN ---
Another theory-heavy chapter. I already can predict complaints that it's too much theory and too little action. But well, if you want Yuta to put his time-travel to good use and train hard in the time-loop, you may as well suffer along with him through it, right? I don't really want to write a short TLDR version of "I spent two years in the time-loop and trained this and that and had mastered X and Y" so here we are.
Also, I like going in-depth of the techniques like that, and that might be not everyone's cup of tea and I understand that, but at the same time, I feel like if I'm to write in the way that I think the majority of readers would enjoy, then the story would lose my own unique vision and personality, and I won't enjoy writing it as much as I do now.
If you like the fic, please consider supporting me on patreon - there are some advanced chapters available there (patreon dot com /SycoreNovels).
Thanks to Loalola, Daoistbm0BeO, AdamD4C, Eyes_Of_The_Void, waltersaaron16, 676867, Adarsh_Sivakumar and Krishna_Razz for the power stones.
This is a lot of names and it's slowly going out of hand, a little bit more and I won't be able to mention everyone, since the notifications in the author panel only shows twenty last voters, and with how some of you vote with one stone multiple times, it soon will be overwritten by new voters before I could mention the old ones. Sorry in advance, but it's inevitable that I stop these mentions at some point. Thanks for throwing your stones at my story though, I appreciate it very much, no matter if I mention the names or not!