Extreme Shadow Clone Training

What if Kakashi invented the shadow clone training method earlier?

Kakashi accepted that Jiraiya would take over Naruto’s training to prepare him against Akatsuki, but his own failure to convince Sasuke to give up revenge and his subsequent defection inspired him try and help Naruto in a meaningful way before he left on his journey. He wanted to ensure that Naruto would be able to contend with Sasuke under Orochimaru’s unethical tutelage and any of the S-rank ninja hunting him, as impossible as that sounded.

And thinking about how Naruto was the youngest ninja to have ever learned the Shadow Clone Technique, he had an idea.

The idea that the experience of a shadow clone practising a skill or technique could be the equivalent of Naruto performing the training himself when said experience is deposited into his memory bank.

If Kakashi’s theory was correct, training with one shadow clone would allow Naruto to gain twice the experience for whatever he was learning. The more shadow clones he trained with then the more experience he would gain in the same amount of time.

When Kakashi brought the idea to Jiraiya, they decided to test it with Naruto’s worst skill, the Clone Technique.

Like in the graduation exam, Naruto tried to create three clones but only managed to create one, albeit one far more stable and life-like than any of his previous attempts. It had improved due to his advances in chakra control, but he had not practiced the ninjutsu at all since he had become a ninja.

With that attempt as the baseline, Naruto’s test was to create 168 shadow clones to practice the Clone Technique for an hour, amounting to exactly seven days’ worth of non-stop training. Naruto dispelled them after the assigned hour and when he next performed the Clone Technique, he created three functional copies without having done any of the training himself.

Most ninja who learned the jounin-level technique would be a lot older and more developed in skill than Naruto, would struggle to use it for training for a worthwhile amount of time, and would take longer to recover their stamina afterwards.

Only Naruto had the perfect combination of his young age, massive chakra levels, and enhanced recovery speed to make this the ideal training tool.

Jiraiya saw a lot of potential in Naruto; he had accomplished great things in his first year as a genin, had more chakra than anyone his age should, and had learned the Rasengan in a truly ingenious way. But he had seen for himself that Naruto was not talented in the ninja arts, not particularly intelligent, and had unstable chakra control. Realistically, he knew that he would not be able to train him to contend with S-rank ninja with only three years of traditional training.

While he had planned to work on Naruto’s foundation and build him up from there – something he had not had the chance to do before now – his focus was to make Naruto as powerful a jinchuuriki as possible. The Nine-Tails’ chakra was the best way to ensure that Naruto would be capable of surviving Akatsuki, so learning how to tap into as much as possible and controlling had been his plan for the next three years.

But now he learned that Naruto could potentially condense decades of training into years. Regardless of talent, he could attain a level of skill that should be impossible for his age.

And that changed everything.

Mastering Chakra Control

The first thing that Jiraiya had Naruto focus on was conquering his greatest weakness: chakra control. He created more chakra than he needed and then applied far less than required for his ninjutsu, causing him to vastly underperform while wasting his stamina.

Jiraiya had originally argued that Naruto did not need to worry about chakra control since he had huge chakra levels and the Nine-Tails’ as well. Under normal circumstances, Naruto likely never would have achieved anything more than just average-level chakra control due to constant disruption of the Nine-Tails’ chakra – which would have been enough considering his stamina – but now he had the opportunity to overcome that.

Now, Jiraiya trained Naruto on every aspect of chakra control:

• Using a 50:50 ratio of physical energy and spiritual energy consistently to create stable and balanced chakra
• Swirling his energies in its natural direction to improve his chakra conversion
• The speed with which he can convert stamina into chakra
• The total amount of chakra he can create at once
• Creating exactly as much chakra he needs for his given task

Naruto’s shadow clones could practice chakra control through meditation – though this was hardly his preference – meant to improve one’s mental energy, and through the standard exercises taken to extremes:

The leaf sticking exercise with leaves planted on different parts of the body; standard position like their heads and hands but increase the difficulty with more awkward locations like on their back, elbows, knees etc. Then increasing the number of leaves so they need to direct chakra to different areas simultaneously to keep them attached. And finally swithing leaves out for heavier objects like pebbles to adjust to the different weight and shape.

The tree climbing exercise by running up and down them at different speeds, running around the tree trucks horizontally, or moving upside-down on the branches. Then using it on different surfaces and larger structures like a cliff wall, some rugged and at an angle while others were worn smooth and completely straight.

And the water walking exercises by running and walking over the water’s surface, adjusting to still water and high-speed rivers, switching from standing on their feet to standing on their hands and back again, and carrying heavy objects to make it harder to balance on the water’s surface.

They fine-tune their skill with chakra enhancement by applying to chakra to different parts of the body as quickly as possible, increasing and decreasing the amount to affect the results. And by using shadow clones, Naruto could avoid hurting himself as they would just self-destruct if they push the skill too far, allowing him to train the skill to a frankly reckless degree.

While he would always struggle to perfect his chakra control, he could potentially achieve a level on par with medical ninja or genjutsu specialists without needing a lifetime to do it. And that chakra control, in turn, laid out the foundation for everything else he could learn.

Mastering Rasengan

As much as Jiraiya believed that using a shadow clone to help create a Rasengan was ingenious – especially when he came up with it in the middle of battle and nearly killed Kabuto – he needed Naruto to understand that this was ultimately a handicap he should overcome to use the Rasengan to its full potential.

A simple demonstration of being able to create and hit Naruto with a low-powered Rasengan before Naruto could create a shadow clone to complete his own proved his point. Jiraiya wanted Naruto to use the Rasengan with the same ease as the Fourth Hokage himself.

Fortunately, Naruto’s advances in chakra control made this task a lot less daunting than it had been when he initially tried to learn it and had his shadow clones to aid him.

They each practiced with a water balloon to spin their chakra wildly in all directions until they could burst it with one hand, followed by increasing the force of their chakra to do the same with the rubber ball. With the two stages remastered from scratch, Naruto could finally bring them together to compress and rotate his chakra in a stable sphere without any helping hands, finally learning the Rasengan as intended.

As Naruto’s greatest offensive option, Jiraiya didn’t allow him to be satisfied with that either.

Once Naruto could create the Rasengan one-handed, he moved onto improving how well he could use it: creating it in his non-dominant hand, increasing the speed and directions of the chakra’s rotation, increasing and decreasing the amount of chakra used, changing its size to make it smaller or larger, and even learning to create one in both hands simultaneously. As his only offensive ninjutsu, it paid to ensure he could use it in any situation in an instant.

Mastering Chakra Natures

Nature transformation is one of the most time-consuming skills for a ninja to learn. The first stage of mastery takes most ninja at least half a year and the second stage normally three times that long. The fact that it can take a couple of years to master even one nature transformation is why many ninjas only bother to learn it for their own affinity, and even jounin will rarely learn more than three in their lifetime.

Jiraiya had not planned to teach Naruto any nature transformation to better focus his efforts, but this was also circumvented by the shadow clone training method. Now Naruto could realistically master all five of the standard chakra natures long before he returned to Konoha.

It was best to learn the nature transformations one at a time rather than trying to learn them all simultaneously due to the focus required. Naruto discovered that his affinity was wind, so he learned in the order: wind, water, earth, lightning, and fire.

Each chakra nature has the same first level of training where they try to affect a leaf by making it split in two with wind, soak it with water, crumble it away with earth, wrinkle it with lightning and burn it with lightning. The second level is more varied with splitting a waterfall with wind, filling a pool with water, breaking a boulder with earth, creating a ball with lightning, and burning a tree with fire.

Mastering nature transformation is required for learning more advanced elemental ninjutsu as higher levels of difficulty need the conscious creation and manipulation of nature transformed chakra rather than just relying on hand-seals. By mastering all five types, Naruto could theoretically learn any elemental ninjutsu and even create his own.

Just as he used shadow clones to learn nature transformation itself, he could use them to learn the individual ninjutsu of each chakra nature as well. As long as he was taught the hand-seal sequence and effect of the ninjutsu, each of his shadow clones could practice them repeatedly until they succeeded. The more they practiced the ninjutsu then the more powerful they could make it, the faster they could use it and the fewer hand-seals they needed to pull it off.

With this potential to learn a truly staggering number of techniques, Jiraiya could almost see the image of his own sensei in Naruto.

Mastering Shadow Clones

An unintended side-effect of constantly training with shadow clones was the fact that Naruto trained the Shadow Clone Technique at the same time. Each day he would create and maintain hundreds of them for several hours which soon totalled up to more time he had ever spent with the ninjutsu active in the entire year previous.

That is not to say that he did not train the Shadow Clone Technique with this method as well.

One exercise Jiraiya came up with was the idea of multiplying the number of times he creates a shadow clone. Naruto creates a single shadow clone, they each create a shadow clone to have four of them in total, then all four of them create a shadow clone and then this is repeated until they hit their limit. Once dispelled, Naruto had the experience of performing the ninjutsu hundreds of times over and steadily refines his ability to use them to perfection.

Naruto becomes able to create larger numbers of shadow clones even faster as he increases how quickly he can generate enough chakra to perform the ninjutsu.

His familiarity with the chakra manipulation allowed him to switch from using the cross-shaped hand-seal to using one hand to even discarding hand-seals altogether (depending on the number of shadow clones at least). They became able to withstand greater level of damage, he could keep more of them active for longer periods when performing difficult training exercises, could create more of them at one, and achieved a greater awareness of where they are located and what they are doing at any given moment.

It was not an exaggeration that no-one could or would ever master the Shadow Clone Technique to the same degree as Uzumaki Naruto.

Limits of Training

For all of this training method’s many advantages, it was not ideal for every type of training and did have its restrictions.

1. Mental backlash

Normally, the information that the shadow clone gives back to Naruto when they dispel seamlessly becomes part of his memory. But the more shadow clones he creates, the longer their existence is maintained and the more intensive their training is then the more information is sent back to Naruto.

This is especially true when the memories of the shadow clones do not resemble each other. When they all practice the same type of skill or technique, if not the exact same one, then the easier it is to understand and assimilate their combined experience but the hours of mental fatigure could potentially knock Naruto unconscious if he wasn’t prepared for it.

That stress is magnified several times over if his shadow clones train in learn several different types of skills at once due to the sheer volume of conflicting memories, the resulting backlash being severe enough that Jiraiya outright forbade Naruto from ever doing it again.

2. Training length

Ordinary ninja would not be able to use shadow clone training is because the chakra cost for creating and maintaining a shadow clone on top of the stamina they would use up for their training. If a ninja could normally trained for six hours alone then found that they could only train for two hours with a shadow clone, then they would actually have achieved less experience in total.

Naruto’s chakra levels are such that he would never truly have to worry about. But if he created his upper limit of a thousand shadow clones to train with, he would be caught in the same situation where he may gain less overall experience than if he had chosen to use only a few hundred of them instead. And the more shadow clones created then the more difficult it becomes to maintain them, especially with how much concentration is requires for training, and that is also fed back to Naruto himself when the ninjutsu ends.

While Naruto can recover from exhaustion more easily than most, using too many for too long could physically and mentally strain him to the point that he cannot train the following day or longer. While not a deal breaker, training too hard was more inefficient than anything.

3. Physical training

Finally, this training method did not have any effect on Naruto’s physical fitness.

Strength, speed, agility, flexibility, balance, coordination, and endurance. None of these could be improved by shadow clones as their feedback has no physical impact on Naruto, for the same reason that he does not receive any damage from their injuries when they dispel. Making his shadow clones exercise would simply be a waste of chakra.

Which meant that, under Jiraiya’s guidance, Naruto himself had to exercise and condition his own body separately.

That said, most ninja need to divide their time between training their skills and training their body but Naruto can do both at the same time. While his shadow clones work on learn and improving his ninjutsu, Naruto himself can focus entirely on improving his physical capabilities.

The Naruto that returned to Konoha was far different from the one that had left.

While training alone would not be enough to guarantee victory against S-rank shinobi, the gap between Naruto and Akatsuki had been closed to a degree that no-one could have predicted.

Water Mistress Mei

Should the Fifth Mizukage have had different kekkei genkai?

Terumi Mei’s signature techniques are specialized in acid, whether using her Lava Release to create volcanic mud or her Boil Release to create acidic vapor.

But she isn’t necessarily the character best suited for using acid as a tool. If anything, it would have made more sense for the Slug Princess Tsunade to have at least one technique which uses acid as it was her summon Katsuyu who first used Tongue Tooth Sticky Acid.

Just as we first saw Gamabunta create toad oil which was later performed by Jiraiya himself or when Manda shed his skin and Orochimaru did the same, it would have been an ideal parallel between the Sannin.

It would provide Tsunade with a ranged ability rather than solely relying on her fists when even her apprentice has one which kneads chemical substances within her own body. She could spew acid in streams or globules, release it as a corrosive gas or even create pits of acid.

So, what could Terumi Mei’s speciality have been instead?

She would be a descendant of two of the most hated clans in the Land of Water and inherited both of their infamous kekkei genkai: Boil Release and Ice Release.

Where most of the country has a genocidal hate for people like her and likely would have killed her before she ever reaches adulthood, Kirigakure has always been willing to use their abilities for its gain. She is one of the many orphans to be taken by the hidden village and inducted into their academy.

While training to become a shinobi, she invests in finding out everything she can about the clans she descends from to learn as much about her innate abilities as possible. As a consequence of her elemental kekkei genkai, Mei was already capable of nature transformation before even become a genin and the Land of Water’s island terrain had led to Kirigakure possessing the largest collection of water ninjutsu in the shinobi world.

With two kekkei genkai sharing the water chakra nature in common, Mei learns to control water in practical any form; manipulating it as a liquid with Water Release, freezing it solid with Ice Release and vaporizing it with Boil Release.

Her mastery of these styles allows her to switch from one to another seamlessly such as engulfing an enemy with a water dragon, freezing it upon impact into an obelisk of of ice which then erupts into a scalding wave of steam. She even learns to combine them in unusual ways such as trapping her enemy in ice then filling it with boiling steam without melting or carrying shards of ice in a current of water.

While Mei lacks the monstrous chakra levels of Yagura or Kisame to perform techniques on their scale, her proficiency and diversity are second to none.

Future Tsuchikage Deidara

What if Deidara had never defected from Iwagakure?

Deidara of Iwagakure was a prodigy with great expectations placed upon him and praised equally as a genius shinobi and as a talented artist.

As a ninja, he had a manic passion for wielding explosions as his weapon by utilizing his Explosion Release kekkei genkai and acquiring knowledge of all manner of explosive weaponry until he become the youngest ninja to be accepted into the Explosion Corps.

As an artist, he was exceptionally gifted at sculpting clay into all manner of animals, people and more abstract shapes which earned the appreciation of his peers, and even influenced the designs of his earth ninjutsu.

Once Deidara heard of a kinjutsu that can knead chakra into inorganic substances, he realized that he might be able to combine his two greatest passions together.

Being as impulsive as he was talented, Deidara wasted no time in seeking it out. He infiltrated the secure vault for Iwagakure’s most prized techniques and weapons, found the kinjutsu and used it there and then to permanently transform himself. Unlike most who had attempted it, he survived the risky process and grew human mouths on both hands and his chest, complete with teeth and tongue.

With any of these mouths – including his original one – he became able to knead the explosive chakra of his kekkei genkai into clay to create his new art and style: Explosive Clay.

His actions broke several laws of the hidden village which would have resulted in his imprisonment, if not execution, which was a fate that Deidara was intended to escape if needed. But when the Third Tsuchikage discovered his trangressions, he saw an opportunity worth taking advantage of.

The very reason that the kinjutsu had been made forbidden and sealed away was because of the very low chances of surviving the physical mutations it causes yet Deidara had survived. That alone would have been a testament to his potential but knowing of the kid’s talent and how powerful his new style could become, Onoki decided that it would be far more worthwhile for his abilities to be used for the good of Iwagakure.

So he instead made Deidara his apprentice. The official story was that the incident was a test to prove that he was worthy of learning from Onoki of Both Scales rather than the crime that it actually was. He didn’t like the boy but he would work to instil a sense of duty and loyalty into him and curb his impulsive, obsessive behavior in the hopes of creating a worthy successor. The fact that they both fought best at range, could fly and possessed highly destructive styles made them quite compatible even if Deidara didn’t possess his kekkei touta.

And thinking of the future, perhaps there could be the beginning of a powerful new bloodline as Onoki knew of the close relationship between Deidara and his granddaughter, Kurotsuchi. The marriage of two powerful ninja in the hopes of creating especially powerful progeny was hardly unusual back in his day, and any children of theirs could potentially inherit two kekkei genkai.

Deidara’s Explosive Clay was capable of unleashing a level of destruction that could single-handedly threaten any one of the enemy hidden villages yet its versatility meant that it could also be used for subtler operations too. That said, Onoki had to work to ensure that Deidara didn’t became too obssessed with his art as left to his own devices, he would focus on his using his clay creations to the exclusion of all else even to his own detriment. He made sure that Deidara fully developed his potential, particularly with their shared affinity for Earth Release and Onoki’s decades of mastery with it.

Once he deemed him worthy of them, Onoki even taught him the Weight Rock techniques with which Deidara could fly without the support of his clay creations as well as enhance their speed and mobility regardless of size without compromising their explosive force.

Deidara carried out missions against vital locations, assassination targets and enemy nations on his kage’s orders, earning a fearsome reputation across the continent even outside of any world wars, all before reaching adulthood. And among the people of Iwagakure and the Land of Earth, he was admired as an upcoming hero whom many believed would soon relieve the aged Tsuchikage of his mantle.

Illusionist Ino

What if Ino became a master of genjutsu?

As one of the Yamanaka Clan, Ino had been learning about the mind and spirit since she could first use chakra to help master their hiden ninjutsu and understand the nuances of its abilities. Most don’t bother to learn anything beyond the basics – except the ones who work in Konoha’s Torture and Intelligence Division – and Ino was no different.

But after Ino was knocked out of the Chuunin Exams, she began to reevaluate what she had learned since leaving from the Academy. She had graduated with the highest overall grades out of her entire class, even above Sasuke himself, yet her team had barely made it past the Forest of Death and she couldn’t even defeat Sakura during the Preliminaries.

Ino knew that her role in the Ino-Shika-Cho was to act as Shikamaru and Chouji’s support rather than take the lead but she believed it was important to be able to fight more independently. And so she decided that learning to further manipulate the mind would be the obvious avenue to pursue improvement.

Taking advantage of her experience with Yin Release, Ino started to learn genjutsu. Like the rest of her classmates, she had only been taught the theoretical application of genjutsu and how to counter it without yet delving into its practicalities. She convinced Asuma to start training her in the shinobi art while Shikamaru trained with his father for the finals. If nothing else, entrapping her opponents within a illusion would serve her well to keep them in place for the Mind Body Switch Technique without relying on her teammates.

And over time, Ino found herself fascinated with the art. She learned increasingly advanced genjutsu from her jounin sensei while developing her mastery of her family’s hiden ninjutsu. But she didn’t stop with just those and continued to expand her knowledge in all kinds of ways on how to affect the mind.

She studied psychology to better understand human behavior, joined medical classes about the human brain and its senses, learned how to hallucinogens and even participated in interrogations and mind delving both on the field and within Konoha.

Ino may have never left her support role on missions but her skills allowed her to fulfill that duty with terrifying perfection.

Bloodline Stealing Shin

What abilities could Shin have possessed instead of the Sharingan?

Shin was one of the many people captured by Orochimaru for the sake of his experiments after defecting from Konoha.

When he investigated the young man’s body in preparation for experimentation, he discovered that Shin had a unique genetic make-up that allowed tissue and organ transplantation with zero chance of rejection. He could be implanted with foreign organic material from any other human being and perfectly assimilate it into his body without adverse effects.

It was a quirk that Shin could have easily gone the rest of his life without knowing about. But Orochimaru instead saw an opportunity to study the effects of splicing the genes of kekkei genkai holders in a single subject, and having a potential vessel who could harness abilities that would otherwise be impossible to learn was far too tempting to ignore.

The first of these experiments was one that had failed before; grafting the cells of the First Hokage to grant the power of the Wood Release. It proved to be a success as, unlike the failures who had been consumed by Hashirama’s immense life force, Shin adapted to the cells without incident.

Orochimaru trained him to use Wood Release to its full potential, recreating ninjutsu from the stories of Hashirama’s lifetime and pitting Shin against other prisoners to practice them in battle. Shin was fascinated by his own potential and wholeheartedly participated in the experiments unlike many other prisoners.

He wished to test the limits of his unique body and was motivated enough that he delved into kekkei genkai research himself as well. By either retrieving the corpses of ninja who had awakened elemental kekkei genkai in life or hunting these ninja and kidnapping them, they gathered more of those genetic abilities for Shin to harness.

His ambition and intelligence helped him become a valuable member of Orochimaru’s entourage rather than merely an experimental subject, to the extent he was placed in charge of one of his facilities.

But before the experiment could reach completion, Orochimaru was defeated by his own protege and left Otogakure rudderless. Having loyalty only to his own ambitions rather than the organisation itself, Shin took all of the research material and set out on his own path to continue his work independently.

Lacking Orochimaru’s resources, Shin cultivated clones from his own flesh and growing them at an accelerated rate to literally create his own subordinates. They were each only capable of using a single kekkei genkai as inferior copies of himself but their similarities and training allowed them to fight in perfect unison with him and each other. He used them to help find his targets and conduct his experiments without having to rely on anyone else he couldn’t absolutely trust.

Over the years he continued to hunt ninja with the abilities he desired until he had acquired every elemental kekkei genkai in existence and worked to perfect his mastery of them. Once he had achieved that goal, Shin decided it was time to reach the next level of his perfection: the Three Great Doujutsu.

And those belonged to Konoha…