Several weeks later, Askuna began seeing glimpses of his mental pocket dimension, or whatever it was, when he focused on meditating on the mental image while trying to repeatedly channel his chakra into it. He felt as if he was peering into an abyss of chakra or a void, which helped him see a mirage of it within the swirl of his internal chakra.
'Sounds like a proper balance between mystifying and confusing' Askuna nodded, satisfied by his profound depictions of unreality.
At one point, he felt it was ready, and it clicked – the virtual access door was created, and he could travel to it. So far, so good. He spent so much time on it that the representation of his desired mindscape inside him was almost perfectly matching his drawings. Careful space planning and detailed expansion made for a convincing 3D VR mini-world.
He decided to refrain from experimenting with fourth dimensions, teleports, portals, etc., for now. Ideally, he would create some clones responsible for mental world improvements, expansion, and safety protocols. He might even sacrifice some clones to see what happens if they explode there. Well, he would become a clone soon too.
"Can some mind arts or space mumbo jumbo or mystic eyes tear a door in reality to this space?" he started considering safety protocols and possible countermeasures.
Well, he would have to create cryptographic keys for safe remote information transfer later on and implement several safety protocols to make it inaccessible from the outside or create tier-based access depending on which key was used. Eventually, he would give up his administrator privileges to the motherlobe; then, if his instances decided to change security, he probably wouldn't care or know anyway.
The best way would be for the motherlobe to restrict unnecessary knowledge from actors that don't need it for their tasks or are in vulnerable positions, but keep the core base of personalities updated and the same. Never mind, back to reality.
How would he execute the technique? With the help of hand seals, of course. The only problem was that he didn't know hand seals, so he had to guess what some of them could look like. It wasn't too difficult, as he had watched anime and there were only so many rational combinations one could check.
Therefore, for the past few months, he created or recreated his own hand seals and tried different combinations while channeling chakra through his system, attempting to match the combinations to particular ideas of his jutsu.
'It just works.' he shrugged, omitting to explore particular questions one could raise, just to keep his soon-to-be fragmented sanity.
The Jutsu would be an operating program with many rules and clauses. The first thing was creating a connection to the mother core, then designing rules concerning it, and finally creating hand seals for all the procedures of clone creation, destruction, and updates.
He doubted that he needed to know exactly how it would work; same as his movement technique, he just had to have a general idea and guide it through training where he wanted. Later on, his mind instances would patch bugs and strengthen the details by providing exactly sophisticated architectures.
The first step was to create the motherlobe, as well as safety procedures in case it failed during creation, so he wouldn't accidentally kill himself by botching the technique. He had never interacted with his chakra in his mindscape before, so it took him several months of interaction and adjustments to create working steps and connect them all together.
Though delving into the details of the complex architectural model could be interesting, let's skip the training arc of several months and jump straight to the results.
Everything was ready, so he prepared his 285-hand-seal jutsu, which was divided into several groups and subgroups, consisting of different procedures and experience-sharing protocols. The good thing was that the main part could be applied once and launched in modules, not necessitating launching all at once.
He had already started the mother core many times, then destroyed it and made changes. He had been careful not to erase himself in the process, so he scrutinized everything meticulously. He also succeeded in creating mental clones; they didn't fight him for control, luckily.
In fact, even if they beat him up, somehow, it wouldn't lead to anything, as the clones were not the ones operating his body. They could operate just chakra, like some mental points of concentration. Their only option was to cooperate.
His motherlobe clone would be responsible for maintaining the chakra pool and jutsu at all times and supplying it with chakra, so he wouldn't have to worry about it shutting down, when he lost consciousness, or his chakra pathways from the brain were sealed. It would still run from his mindscape without his conscious will. The only way would be to drain him of the chakra or stop it from flowing through the body.
Considering the number of things motherlobe would be responsible for. Probably during scaling up, they will later create a separate maintenance unit from the processing one. But the hard part of optimization is left for later.
In fact, the mental cloning technique was the easiest part and was used by him rather extensively when creating the jutsu to speed up the process and test out the motherlobe's capabilities. He would have to transform one of his mental clones into such a being, after all.
Now, it was time to execute the technique without failures, step by step.
Alone in his room, Askuna performed the hand seals in a well-practiced manner, taking sufficient breaks. There were no failures between the steps and connecting the modules, which was made simple through constant prior repetitions of substeps in his training arc. In the end, this technique in itself didn't cost too much chakra, as all the steps were just minor manipulations of its working rules, but they were necessary for precision's sake.
Once finished, he didn't waste any time before quickly entering his mental world to see the mothercore working. Observing that everything was implemented correctly, he noted that his connection with the main unit was stable. The principle was that he would send all data to it all the time, but the feedback of overwriting him would only occur when he was in a position to do so, to avoid interruptions to the functioning of his mortal body—ideally, several times a day in safe places or during sleep when other instances would watch over his body for him.
There was no need for any conversation with his second brain, as it was a copy of his own mind from just seconds prior, that constantly monitored his thoughts. He would sync himself with the update, adding thoughts of the motherlobe, which didn't really care about being a core and lacking a body since it had visuals over his own mindscape anyway. As expected of his own mind.
It would be the strongest processing unit, capable of analyzing memories of multiple clones. A physical form would only be a bother for it. It would collect information from hundreds of perspectives and experiences and sort them through to keep their personality stable.
He would probably have to fine-tune some procedures later on and configure the proper pipeline, but chakra was a good problem solver for things one couldn't design. You just needed to make a model "good enough" for chakra to fill in the gaps.
Why would he create such a technique, and not use just clones in his mindscape to help him with chakra? Well, for efficient experience sharing, team project designation, information management, and any problems that could arise from a free uncontrolled model.
As for clone creation, the motherlobe was now the overseer of all the jutsu being made by other actors, but it was also a clone itself, so it also had access to his chakra, even though it was in his mindscape and couldn't move his body.
Could it perform virtual hand seals, moving chakra in his body like real ones? Nope, his previous tests with mental clones showed that they couldn't do it. The movement part of his body seemed important for some reason.
Therefore, as his main processing unit couldn't perform jutsu by just imagining hand seals themselves, he needed to circumnavigate this issue by simulating them. But it didn't prove challenging from the design standpoint, just replicating the movement of the chakra.
Even though manipulating chakra-like hand seals without actually performing them was much harder, he hoped that his clones would be able to break it down into components and master sharing the burden.
Concerning physical applications of his technique, the only regretful thing was, that none of his clones was able to move his body directly, only by clever applications of chakra, like roots, steel-like supports, or launching propelling. He will have to work on incorporating those assists into his movements.
So, for the small price of being slightly overwritten now and then, he was the one governing the body, the one connected to his body, and no clone could do anything about it—or so he supposed. It wouldn't matter even if they deleted him, as they would synchronize soon and would be the same person, under motherlobe.
Anyway, back out of his own mind, Askuna proceeded with the creation of additional clones to see how they could cooperate through motherlobe in moving chakra through his body. Quite well, in fact.
After several days of testing and learning that teamwork made the dream work, his mental clones could emulate chakra moving through his body like hand seals with ten of them working together at it simultaneously.
Actually, moving it like a single-hand seal wasn't too hard; three or four of them could accomplish it. But the real challenge was the transition between different hand seals, as well as the speed, which was significantly slower than doing it the traditional way.
Well, they were still improving at it, by training with different combinations of hand seals. The hand seals themselves didn't do anything, as there was no intent put into the chakra behind them, but it was still training, and it used a minuscule amount of chakra as it moved inside him. And it would probably make any sensor looking at him weirded out by random fluctuations of his chakra.
'Well, happens.' he shrugged, looking at the data of chakra consumption monitored by motherlobe.
The clones themselves were somewhat of a burden on his chakra and, surprisingly, his mental strength, making him feel very tired for the first two weeks. This resulted in him dispelling them frequently, leaving only the motherlobe. But after some optimizing of the stack and enduring in the following months, his proverbial limits increased, whether due to his body's reaction or his chakra responding to the strain, he didn't know.
Months later.
When he was five years and two months old, there was a New Year celebration, and he learned it had been 50 years since the founding of the village. There were huge festivities, and everyone prayed that there wouldn't be a second war.
'Well, they can hope,' Askuna thought while trekking with his parents through stalls near the river. It was an evening full of noise, lights, and happiness. 'kind of boring. I would have preferred to stay at home,' mused Askuna to himself as he looked around.
He wasn't too well-versed in the timeline, but since the war was probably starting soon, it was the era of Kushina and Minato in the academy, so they could be older than him. He had already convinced his parents to let him join the academy at the next enrollment, so he would see how much genius he needed to display to be in the same class as them... and then leave them in the dust.
Why, you ask? Well, there was no real reason. People tend to be drawn to things they know, and he doubted he would be interested in going through the academy and meeting other kids. But the main characters? Sure, he might even troll Minato.
Well, at least he will be semi-adult when trolling Kakashi and Itachi. If he will care, honestly, with his cheating of multiple minds he will probably become Saitama of Naruto world in a few years. Sure, he is not a genius or anything, but when his chakra capacity expands he will be one man army, with a learning rate leaving everyone else in the dust.
He yawned, and his dad ruffled his hair.
Since his hive was working and expanding all the time, he didn't think he would be in any danger or put any stakes on the line by living in this world. He already had ten clones working tirelessly on his chakra control all the time—well, not now in public, but at home—so his progress was incredible.
But really, imagine when his chakra reserves began to grow exponentially, because he is sure he or one of his thousands of clones will find a way, and he could increase the number of clones by a factor of 100. How could even Madara or demigods compare to that? His one year of training was equivalent to a hundred years for other people.
His clones could work all the time; they didn't get mentally tired too much, although there were instances when some of them took breaks, so the motherlobe could have some memories of it since it handled most of the work of sorting through the information.
Particular clones reset their fatigue by updating, in fact losing their differences and receiving gains from all other clones. It works like flushing. The only thing that could never reset was his motherlobe.
He used the terms main processing unit, motherlobe, and mothercore interchangeably. The problem arose when the motherlobe was too tired, all instances became tired. Therefore, there were some break periods for the motherlobe, during which it didn't process information and paused updates. The information was stored temporarily in a queue, waiting for the motherlobe to become active again.
The system wasn't perfect; he would have to think about ways of implementing an order of things and cycles to make the mothercore available to work at all times. Perhaps he could have two subcores, working and resting in alternation, and then sending the information in chunks to the motherlobe. Or not all information needed to be processed by the motherlobe; it could be processed by subcores and then sent in one package later to the main system. Alternatively, the main system might not even receive some of the information until needed.
When more aspects than just hand seals and maintaining the perpetuum of the technique could be implemented, there might be a possibility of creating some sublobes that would work on sorting information and experiences from particular projects, and only sending the results to the main mothercore.
Choices. Well, he would work on this; it wasn't as if he had anything better to do nowadays. He looked around, realizing he had lost sight of his parents in the crowd. "Ehh..." he sighed and added mentally, "The pre-cellphone era sucks."
At least, one of his mental clones was rational enough to point him in the direction of his parents.
End of Chapter 2.