Regardless of how much my overreach had hurt, my estimations on my recovery had proven true. After spending two weeks going through the work that had built up during my convalescence, I had enough time to focus on the more important things than simply filling orders for swords and making money.
Like finding a more secure place to do my work.
Looking around the small cellar, I nodded. By virtue of seniority, I'd assigned Sai the task of removing all of the previous owner's old stock to either use, sell off, or dispose of. Little of it was actually suitable to the kinds of ceramic weapons I made, but there were some odds and ends I could craft and fire so I'd justified keeping a small pile in reserve.
The real prize was the now-clean room beneath the wooden hatch in the rearmost part of the new building.
It was small, perhaps only a bit bigger than three meters by three meters with a height just under that.
"That means... ten by ten by eight in freedom units." I muttered, looking around and inspecting everything closely. The previous owner hadn't bothered to properly enclose the space, having likely wanted a certain cool dampness to maintain the area's low temperature and keep the unused stocks of clay moist for later use. Or something. I wasn't an expert on pottery by any means.
However, I could fix all that.
Nodding to myself, I unfolded the small drafting table I'd brought down with me and began laying out the sheets of paper and ink along with the variety of brushes I'd need. After ensuring the hatch door was securely closed and my oil lamps were positioned properly, I cracked my knuckles and got started. Sagara had taken Sai to inspect a shipment of new materials and Torune was simultaneously watching the counter as well as doing some detail work on a few blades I'd finished. Whatever criticisms I had against him, he could bring metal to a mirror shine and his work on handles, sheathes, and wraps were possibly better than my own.
I swear he'd blushed when I said that. Who knew Aburame were that vulnerable to a little praise?
I shook my head and returned my focus to my work.
The thing about fuuinjutsu was... it was heavily limited by what any given practitioner thought was possible. Also, there were at least two kinds of practical application of the discipline. Oh, and even with those two different kinds of practical application you had dozens of various schools under the broad umbrella usually identified as 'fuuinjutsu.' I guess what I'm really trying to say is that it was a complete mess of a subject that had arbitrary theory and practical application thrown together according to whatever individual wrote any given scroll or gave you lessons.
Gods Above and Below... I might actually kill someone for access to wikipedia. Hell, I'd even take TV tropes.
One thing that I'd completely misunderstood about the information I drew from the Pure World was that it was 'perfect' in a way that no human compendium of knowledge would ever be. Every scrap of information was categorized, sorted, and organized in a way that I could only describe as beautiful. While I was 'creating' martial arts and formulating metallurgical applications, I'd never really had anything to compare the knowledge I was drawing from against. I wasn't a Yamanaka and couldn't jump inside Sagara's head to see how I measured up, after all.
I strongly suspected that it was him measuring up against me now, though.
Even if I drew the comparison to a single expenditure of potential giving me a high-school-equivalency, even that fell dramatically short of the reality. The only way to properly describe it was if someone spent between twelve and sixteen hours per day doing nothing but understanding and practicing whatever information they chose for at least several years. Again, though, that didn't quite explain the depths to which I was cheating, because even the greatest genius would have flaws in his memory, understanding, or application. The only part of the equation that I fell short in was needing to properly synthesize all of the various fields I was pulling from and experiment until I found a way to fill in the gaps between those fields.
My mind flashed back to the scrolls Obito had given me and the birthday present of fuuinjutsu primers from Naruko (Kushina). I'd ridiculed them both privately, though I think I'd griped a bit about the former to Obito. In retrospect, though, I shouldn't have been as harsh as I was.
It might have been egotistical of me to think so, but...
They are only human, aping a flawed understanding of a world so far beyond them it would take the eyes of a god to see how short they fall.
Was it still arrogance if it was true?
I sighed, blowing the air out in a steady stream to finish drying the final sheet of paper I'd just scrawled out a nearly-identical formula on.
"Case in point." I muttered as I put away my tools momentarily and folded up the desk before taking all of it up to the room above. Standing on the bottom rung of the ladder, I took the first sheet I'd finished in hand, making sure it was the correct one in the process, before touching it to the floor and channeling chakra through it.
Instantly, the packed earth which made up the floor turned into a solid foot-thick of pure granite.
I pressed my hand to it and extended my senses, feeling the faint echo of the energy fading through the transformed material.
"This is why ninja can't do construction." I stated as I went over my work with excessive care and attention. This would be my laboratory space, after all, and it needed to be fit for that. No normal technique performed by a normal ninja could have given me the kind of uniform and stable construction I'd just performed. Having tried the technique on the small-scale, it was hard to even fully-transform a given chunk of dirt into stone, let alone all of it into the same kind of stone. Or do so with the kind of permanence I would require.
A shinobi could clear a patch of land more efficiently than any bulldozer, of course, but performing a technique to an engineering-grade level was never a requirement for anything in their lives. In a pinch, they could probably repurpose a given technique for temporary shelter or other utility use, but... as I'd told the girls...
Speed, power, control; pick two.
If you know fuuinjutsu, though, you can front-load all of the preparatory work, precision, and application.
This was one of the two main schools of fuuinjutsu. You could write out a technique formula, put a seal on the outside of it, store activation chakra within it, and then trigger it. The most famous example was the explosive tag. Coincidentally, I'd actually seen a few of the low-power ones Tenten used last year during her final academy days and they were actually more miscalibrated fire element manipulation techniques than a proper bomb. The mission-grade stuff they sold exclusively to active-duty ninja was probably better, though.
All of that just goes to show, though, that it didn't take much to make something blow up.
Pushing away the separate train of thought carrying my idle speculations, I finished my inspection of the floor and quickly applied the next set of tags to the four walls, then the final one to the ceiling. The last of these was done while I hung from the top of the ladder just in case I'd miscalculated and the walls wouldn't have held the half-thick sheet of granite I'd turned the packed earth into to serve as a ceiling.
Confident in my work as I was, I also didn't want to be crushed under an avalanche of shattered rock because I'd made a simple miscalculation. In that same spirit of caution, I took even longer to thoroughly inspect the ceiling before deciding to draw up a few more sheets to create 'support beams' out of a pile of the clay we'd decided to get rid of.
A bit more sure of myself, I even added a few stylistic touches to the addition, turning the clay into a series of arching bands of thick oak to...
I stopped cold as I looked at what I'd just done, then sucked in a deep breath.
"It doesn't count as mokuton if the wood isn't alive." I told myself, then forced myself to believe it.
Six Path's Sage Chakra is absolute bullshit.
Instead of getting lost down that rabbit-hole, I went up to install the security seals I'd designed on the entry hatch. Or, rather, I removed the old hatch, installed the new tungsten-alloy hatch and frame I'd clandestinely finished the day prior, then activated the engraved seals to fuse the outer portions to the surrounding material. A sturdy door was no good if you could just tear it off its hinges, after all.
Once the hatch was properly set, I overlaid the old hatch onto the new one, discreetly attaching the former to the latter so that it perfectly camouflaged the changes. After making sure it all worked as intended, I touched a finger to the security seals and felt them snap into place.
I stood, blinking, as I looked around the room, trying to remember-
My body jerked as I reflexively pulled at the invading chakra, pushing it out just long enough to activate the hidden 'key' that took the form of a small pellet imbued with a counter-technique to the one I'd had Yakumo charge for me on the door.
Shaking off the reality-bending illusion as it seemed to reluctantly leave my mind, I inhaled deeply. "Those techniques are just fucking evil." Even keyed in as I was, the hatch appeared to be solid, unbroken floor. Only a careful application of the tree-walking technique to unlock the latch actually allowed me to prove to myself that the section of floor was fake. I still felt a strange kind of resistance as I reached through to reassure myself there was a space beyond it.
I went below, shaking my head as I began installing the other sets of security seals.
It had been easy enough for me to get the Kurama heiress to charge a few chakra storage 'batteries' for me once I began her tutelage on pre-constructing illusionary artwork to use in the field. A perfectly plausible reason to need her to donate chakra for me to experiment with. It surely had nothing to do with the fact that, if I'd gotten my calculations correct, even a Hyuuga looking into the earth below the building would only see more unbroken soil.
Let me repeat, once again, that the Kurama genjutsu were fucking terrifying.
After I had shaken off another set of illusions trying to convince me that I was standing in a mass of solid packed earth, I began drawing out the next set of fuuinjutsu I'd need to install. Even with my perfectly-sure hands and the finest brushes and smoothest inks I'd been able to afford, it was still a challenge to ensure the various designs didn't bleed into each other. I'd have honestly preferred to use a pen here, but the ones I had available weren't built to use the kinds of ink I needed to. Plus, the ink they used dried too quickly for me to complete the entire 'circuit' of the seal, as I'd discovered.
"Damn finicky magic bullshit," I growled under my breath as I carefully destroyed a sheet I'd made a mistake on.
The second broad type of fuuinjutsu was the construction of barriers. I think this school of thought had developed first, really, as you could see the same kind of constructions in creating delayed-technique-activation seals. In essence, creating a delayed-activation technique, like an explosive tag, was simply drawing a barrier around a technique formula, then charging it up to make it ready to go off later. Making a standalone barrier, on the other hand, was both easier and deceptively simple in its applications.
Because you could make a barrier to contain, bar, or retain anything.
For instance, you could create a barrier that didn't allow light to pass... or air or water or rats or dogs or... whatever you wanted.
I set the last of my new barrier-seals to dry, resolving to charge them over the next several days. Unlike the comparatively simple earth-element techniques I'd used to shift the soil to granite, these would take a truly monstrous amount of chakra.
Even if I couldn't perform all of Hagoromo's techniques, his personal skills still allowed me a unique understanding and perspective on space and time. As I scampered back up the ladder to the sound of Torune finally finishing his work and calling for further instruction, I was confident that I'd either permanently solve my need for private space... or collapse my little laboratory into a singularity.
The latter was a fringe possibility, though.
I was sure.