Pupet Master in Konoha

After the opening ceremony, the Third Hokage quickly left the school. It seemed he was very busy with work.

The directors took the students back to their classrooms to begin the new semester.

After bidding farewell to Inuzuka Jaw, Hideki also returned to his office.

His office was located on the first floor of the teaching building. Although the space was small, it was very clean, which saved him a lot of effort.

After all, Hideki had decided to make significant adjustments to his teaching plan to address the bad reputation of the puppet technique.

To catch up with tomorrow's first class, he had to start working now.

Hideki first sat at his desk, took out a notebook, and read through it.

It contained the teaching plan he had made earlier, which was mainly based on the latter half of the Sunagakure puppet technique textbook.

However, since Hideki was only responsible for an elective course, he couldn't expect the students to focus the majority of their time and energy on it, like Sunagakure's puppet apprentices.

Therefore, he had previously removed and significantly modified the content of the textbook and formulated a teaching plan suitable for the physical abilities of Konoha's younger students.

Puppets can be broadly divided into two parts: puppet creation and puppet manipulation.

For practical reasons and class time constraints, Hideki decided to focus the course on puppet control.

As for the puppet creation part, it required a lot of professional knowledge and had slow results, so Hideki planned to make it an advanced topic, to be introduced once talented students were selected.

It was sufficient for ordinary students to master how to create and repair simple ninja mechanisms.

Even in terms of puppet control, Hideki only planned to teach the most basic parts.

Being a former ninja academy student himself, he never feared underestimating the students with the worst possible malice.

Simply teaching the most basic technique of creating chakra threads for puppet control would probably be enough to make students, who haven't even learned tree climbing or water walking, break a sweat.

Thus, in Hideki's view, it would be a blessing if the students could learn to create and maintain chakra threads by the end of the semester, using them to activate simple mechanisms.

This way, the students would have a good way of defending against enemies. By the end of the first semester of the puppet course, everything should be satisfactory.

—Of course, the premise of all of this was that the course could proceed smoothly…

Now that Hideki realized the prejudices against puppets were more serious than he had imagined, achieving this teaching goal might not be so easy.

You have to know, learning puppetry is inherently boring.

If students still have prejudices against puppets, persistence is impossible.

That's why Hideki decided to incorporate an entertaining teaching method, hoping to awaken the children's enthusiasm for learning how to use puppets.

"The key is in cultivating chakra threads..."

Hideki rubbed his chin and reflected for a long time before gradually clarifying his thoughts.

"We need to make it as novel and interesting as possible without reducing the efficiency of practice."

"It's even better if it's interesting enough that students are willing to practice on their own outside of class to make up for the lack of class time."

Hideki felt he had finally found a spark of inspiration and quickly pulled out another worn notebook from his arms and opened it.

This notebook contained information about the ninja tools and puppet ideas he had invented over the years, as well as ideas he had not yet had time to implement.

Hideki thought he could make chakra thread training more interesting by turning his inventions into teaching materials to aid in training.

"It should be able to train everyone's ability to control chakra threads in all aspects, and it must be interesting. It should also be useful in actual combat..."

Hideki murmured to himself as he flipped through his notes.

But after searching for a long time, he couldn't find the ninja tool he was looking for.

It wasn't until he almost reached the beginning of the notebook that his eyes stopped on one of the pages.

"Small Puppet Beast 1.0... I really miss it."

Hideki said excitedly.

It turns out that Hideki came from a common background and wasn't born with a lot of chakra, so to reduce consumption, he decided to take the route of small puppets after initially mastering puppet surgery.

And this Small Puppet Beast 1.0 was the first result he spent a lot of time creating.

Because its main purpose was to detect and attract enemies, its appearance often resembled various cute animals.

Hideki put a lot of effort into the materials and manipulation to make them look realistic.

However, due to their small size and Hideki's limited puppet-making skills at the time, only small hidden weapons could be installed inside these puppet beasts, which weren't very lethal.

To compensate for this deficiency, Hideki had mentally prepared himself to treat them as disposable ninja tools and reluctantly packed many detonating seals inside them...

As a result, this version 1.0 of the small puppet beast was nicknamed "explosively cute."

It was with this small puppet beast that could self-destruct at any time that Hideki began to make a name for himself on the battlefield.

But the price was that people hated him during that period and even attracted the resentment of many small animals.

Because after repeatedly succeeding, the enemy ninjas who were tricked would ruthlessly use AOE ninjutsu to attack all the cats and dogs in sight...

Since even real ninjas couldn't resist the temptation of the small puppet beasts, wouldn't it be a safe way to use them as teaching materials? It would definitely be very popular.

Unfortunately, this small puppet beast might not serve as teaching material now.

Because with the current level of the students, and let alone controlling them vividly, it would be difficult even to use chakra threads just to make them move, much less practice with them.

But this idea was so attractive that Hideki couldn't help but wonder if it could be further modified to meet the requirements as teaching assistance.

But to complete the design and modification before tomorrow's class was impossible, no matter how he looked at it.

"It seems it's time to use that move..."

—Everyone believed that Hideki reached great heights after obtaining the second half of the puppet technique textbook, attributing his success to talent and luck.

However, what they didn't know was that the reason Hideki was able to learn to handle puppets through self-study was actually due to a ninjutsu he created...

It is said that during a break in the Second Great Ninja War, Hideki overheard a sermon given by an old monk in the marketplace.

The sect he promoted was a bit special—it was the legendary Ninja Sect.

Hideki was surprised at first, wondering how anyone could know about the Ninshu Sect from thousands of years ago.

But then he thought about it: the legend of the Sage of the Six Paths has been passed down to the present day and even became the existence of the god of creation. So, it's very possible that some devout followers transmitted the Ninshu Sect he created up to the present day.

The old monk didn't provide any practical information; he simply told everyone the story of the Sage of the Six Paths, who taught the world how to benefit from the Ninshu Sect.

Unfortunately, just like a thousand years ago, what people really wanted was ninjutsu that could provide them with practical benefits. They had no interest in the Ninshu Sect, which achieved mutual understanding through chakra.

So, in the end, the old monk had to leave sadly.

Hideki didn't actually gain any direct benefits from the old monk, but the concept of the Ninja remained in his mind like the melody of a song whose name he couldn't quite remember.

After several days of careful thought, Hideki discovered the problem and came up with a rather bold idea:

"According to the original work, the Sage of the Six Paths explained the true meaning of chakra, using it to connect the spiritual energy of people through chakra in order to achieve ultimate peace—understanding one another without words."

"But warlike humans ultimately did not meet the Sage's expectations and chose to use chakra to connect their own mental and physical energy, thereby amplifying the chakra in their bodies and turning it into power."

"Here's the interesting question..."

"What if you use chakra to connect with your own spiritual energy?"

This idea might seem a bit fantastical. After all, where can one find a second "self" in the world?

In fact, according to the laws of most worlds, creating an external incarnation that has the same thoughts as one's own is a very high-level ability that ordinary people can't touch.

But what's interesting is that the ninja world where Hideki lives is precisely an exception.

With the help of chakra, one can easily have a second "self" just by learning the B-rank Shadow Clone Jutsu.

To verify his hypothesis, Hideki spent almost all his savings to buy a scroll for the Shadow Clone Jutsu in the black market and then spent several months learning it.

On the day he mastered it, he couldn't wait to start experimenting, connecting his own spiritual energy with that of his shadow clone through chakra.

As a result, Hideki's head exploded thirty seconds later...

Full stop.

—Well, to be precise, it was the head of Hideki's shadow clone that exploded and then disappeared in a puff of white smoke.

Although it seemed like the experiment had failed, Hideki rarely let out a sly laugh after holding his forehead through the intense headache.

Because this experiment had been more successful than he had imagined.

In those short thirty seconds, Hideki realized that his thoughts had become clearer and sharper than ever before.

And this sharpness allowed him to instantly grasp the reason behind it.

When people's spiritual energies are connected through chakra, they can communicate without words.

When one's own spiritual energy and the shadow clone's energy are connected through chakra, since they come from the same source, the efficiency of communication becomes even more terrifying, allowing for an exchange of a large amount of information in an instant.

This also means that Hideki could use the shadow clone's brain to help him think in real time.

To use an analogy, it's like a single-core CPU turning into a multi-core CPU, or one computer becoming a group of several computers.

The brains of the main body and the shadow clone are closely connected through chakra, doubling the "computing power" and naturally increasing the speed of thought.

The reason the shadow clone's head exploded suddenly was because the speed of thought was so rapid that it exceeded the load the shadow clone's brain could handle.

Moreover, in subsequent repeated tests, Hideki also discovered that the human brain is different from a CPU, which can only perform calculations. When thinking comprehensively about a problem, it can also inspire and capture fleeting ideas more easily.

It is said that Edison once said that genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.

But there's actually another phrase he said afterward: the 1% inspiration is even more important than the 99% sweat.

Therefore, the result of Hideki's experiment wasn't just making him think faster—it allowed him, who was originally just an average person, to become a true genius in a short period of time.

So, Hideki Kimura, who had no heavenly-defying tricks or extraordinary talent, finally created a brilliant technique for himself over ten years after arriving in the ninja world.

Considering that this technique essentially allows the main body and the shadow clone to have high-speed discussions in the mind through chakra, and the brain needs to operate at an incredibly high speed when using it, Hideki gave this technique a very fitting name:

Brainstorming Techniques.

However, Hideki found that in order to achieve real-time communication between the main body and the shadow clone, it was necessary to consume a large amount of chakra at every moment.

Limited by the amount of chakra and the shadow clone's endurance, even after many improvements, Hideki could only become a genius for three minutes a day at most.

But three minutes a day add up to something significant, slowly changing Hideki's life in the ninja world.

In fact, the reason Hideki was able to master the puppet technique through self-study was also thanks to this ninjutsu.

How to continue improving this ninjutsu's effect is also one of the important issues Hideki plans to address when he returns to Konoha this time.

But before that, his most important task now is to use this technique to find a solution to the current problem...