>>5938208On your sixth day of traveling, you know you’ll be at Sunlight Inn Town just before nightfall. You spend that day practicing your ninjutsu.
Sometimes you find the limitations of forming a jutsu exhausting. A jutsu does exactly what it is formed to do, no more, no less. Water Spikes Jutsu will always create water spikes, Hiding in Mist will always form mist, and once a jutsu has been formed it’s normally immediately released or maintained to hold onto an unalterable effect until you let it go. Even when it’s not released immediately your ability to change it after the jutsu has been formed is essentially zero.
The Water Control jutsu brings this concept into starker relief than normal. You form the Inu seal. You project your will towards an existing body of water, and then you shove it. You can shove it hard, or soft, you can replicate some telekinetic control, but you can only move the water in one particular way. If you form the jutsu with the intention that the water will go up, it will ONLY go up. If you form the jutsu with the intention that the water will form a sphere and rotate around you in a circle, it will ONLY rotate around you in a circle. Changing your mind requires you to release your control over the jutsu, which inevitably leads to the water splashing on the ground at the speed of gravity, often too fast for you to reassert a new kind of control.
With many long hours of practice, however, you begin to learn of the ways in which you can manipulate jutsu. You may not be able to modify them after they’ve been formed, but you can modify the intent of your jutsu so that the form of it is more pliable to interaction.
Instead of willing the water to float up, you can instead will the water to move with an amplified motion following the urging of your hands.
You push out, and it surges forward. You pull your hands back in, and it surges back.
The Water Control Technique itself isn’t capable of dramatic effects like other jutsu. It’s unlikely that you could ever seriously use it as an attack. But practice with it has opened your mind to the fact that you can apply this knowledge to your other jutsu.
You remember your mother teaching you the water bullet: Yours burst out of your mouth because it was formed without refined intention. Hers beamed out as a laser-thin blast of fluid that shattered a rock with ease.
It wasn’t that she was necessarily using a different, better jutsu… Or maybe at that level of refinement it IS a different jutsu, considering that the intent must have been heavily altered from the way you understand it…
The Water Bullet technique was the most versatile one you had in that regard. Perhaps with different hand seals and different ideations of intent while you form the chakra, you could develop or rediscover new applications for your jutsu, and if the change was dramatic enough and could be replicated consistently, that would warrant consideration is the invention of a new technique.
