Jiraiya had me move to pure Earth Release training. "To ground you," he said. "Balance all that compressed wind chaos with something solid."
He made it sound easy. Like Earth would welcome me back like a mother's hug.
Earth did not hug me.
It slid out from under me like a bad rug joke.
The training field was littered with boulders and cracked ground from our earlier Wind experiments. I stood in the middle, palms pressed together, focusing on the flow.
Push chakra into the ground. Shape it. Raise a wall. Textbook Earth Release.
Mnstead, I watched the terrain ripple. The dirt shifted two feet to the left like it was on some underground treadmill.
Jiraiya, observing from atop a rock, didn't even flinch. "That's new."
"I'm not building anything," I said, frustrated. "It's just... sliding."
"Maybe you're not supposed to build. Maybe your chakra doesn't care about 'stable.'"y chakra refused to obey. Not violently. Not lazily.
It just didn't want to form.
I
The next few hours were trial and error.
Mostly error.
I tried to raise a platform. The rock tilted sideways.
I tried to form a shield. The ground crumbled just in time to let a pebble hit me in the shin.
"Solid defense," Jiraiya said dryly.
"I swear the earth is trolling me."
But slowly, I leaned into the wrongness.
Instead of trying to force shapes, I let my chakra move like it wanted: not as pressure, but as imbalance.
The earth didn't rise. It buckled.
It didn't form. It cracked.
And when I stepped forward with intent, the terrain shifted beneath my opponent's stance.
It was clumsy.
But it worked.
"I think you're learning a different language," Jiraiya said as I stood over the remnants of what was supposed to be a spike but looked more like a dirt wave.
"Cool. I'll just write a new textbook: 'How Not To Use Earth Release the Right Way.'"
He chuckled. "Void-style terrain tactics. You're rewriting how the ground thinks."
"Or gaslighting it."
That night, I tried to meditate again.
No Nature Energy. Just listening. Feeling.
And this time, I heard something.
Not words. Not voices.
But rhythm.
A pulsing pattern beneath the surface of the earth.
Crack. Pull. Hold.
It wasn't about force.
It was about timing.
Maybe my chakra wasn't weak.
Maybe it just didn't like being told what to be.
Neither do I.
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Every bit of support keeps the Void walking forward.
— void_chakra