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<sub>The cloud form iron was enveloped in his own chakra. He used it to crush the now hardened air moisture. It separated into little more than fragile grains against the insane backdrop of the sky. It pulverized beneath the grasp of his intertwined energies and compacted. It became a moving brace of dotted matter, tiny spotted cores of mineral and stone twitching in the night or day or twilight that glowed before him.

He performed a blurring succession of handseals, fingers interlocked. As he formed each one, a pattern of super-thin constellations was outlined above him. They shone in glaringly bright energy. His chakra spun out of him in visible puffs. It ingrained itself deeper into the shivering hard-matter air.

The loose connections that caused it to spread became charged with a static-like buzzing of intent. The holes that had previously formed began again, only smaller. They were arranged in neat rows, and soon grew smaller still. The entire iron powder surface he'd created was re-formatting itself. The construct became stronger and more durable.

The dense material it was born from broadened. From a tiny rock-hard center it stretched out. It covered itself with whatever was available. Each molecule around him was swiftly broken down and re-joined from its most insignificant compound up. They gathered first around his body, centered on his clasped hands, and were finally pooled into the hardened black metal cloud.

It descended slowly. It was now simply a square block of crystal. When it fell within his reach, he ran his hands (or he felt as if he had, or perhaps it was a dream, or a nightmare most definitely something on the precipice of being or of being done, perhaps...) along its surface. It pulsed with something like life beneath his touch. His chakra was wound throughout its length and insinuated between the rigid molecules and hardened to a strictness more permanent and real then anything else around him.


He woke up.</sub>

<sub>The scenery seemed unchanged. Around him, the shards collected themselves into mere dust. They melted back into the familiar unfamiliar of the dream-scape. Able to move freely, he stretched. He began rotating his shoulders, and gathered more chakra from his core.

It started to spread out and envelop the boat and water. His hands were clapped together. His eyes were shut tight and twitching slightly with the intensity of his focus. The air around him became stiff with the atmospheric pressure of his chakra's influence. Random molecules free-falling like snow on some high mountain settled and bonded closely together and warped.

Physical and spiritual energy collided. At the point where they met, they destroyed themselves in a manic fury. What residual mass was left from their ruination clung to each other. They swirled in the air like a cloud of flies. They shifted from a type of muddy black ash, to eerie ghost refractions of the vibrant sky.

Everything seemed covered in a mealy coat. It was still soft and imperfect. The same holes that had just formed intruded into the magnetic sphere of his imaginary form yet again. He panicked. His chakra reached forward with a sweeping gesture of heaviness and purpose and finality, it reached with the same force of will as Naitome's own determination.

It was aided by his considerable fatigue. His chakra attempted to encompass the totality of all that was attempting purchase in the ionized air with a simple command; hold. He could feel the vibration from his efforts. As he demanded that the stiffening creation contain its structure, it rebelled against him. In one shuddering oscillation of defiance, a loud >pop< caused his eyes to open, and he stood in renewed silence, an unwavering block of semi-solid mineral in the kaleidoscopic business of his mind.</sub>

The sound of windows burst open. Everywhere, surrounding him, tunnels of light latched on to pollution-thick fog and floating dust and the bile and dung and overgrown molds of a hundred thousand lost creatures converging on a landscape that did not exist. He was deep within the clinging dream architecture of his own mind. There were stories and armor-shelled memories and daemons. There were monsters and atrocities of form committed to a purity of vileness so absolute that it made their grotesquerie seem beautiful. He was a stranger and a creator. An outcast. A god.

He opened his eyes, or imagined he did, or hoped to, and saw himself sitting on a boat formed from the cobalt chitin of some gargantuan insect, the sky a swirling vortex of color and pattern that coalesced with a nearby system of hills and valleys. He sat atop water that shimmered in strange reflection of an alien heaven. He was not frightened. He observed.

The ocean around the large boat seemed sick with color, and from its depths, small aquatic thoughts jumped up and met the air and took the form of flowers or knives or pointed teeth. These things arched overhead, back and forth, and without much thought as to their purpose or his own, Naitome reached out with an interrupting wave of chakra, his only intention being control.

The wave of chakra was formed with Naitome's knowledge of...nothing, for what constituted knowledge in this place....as its base....so fleeting his thoughts were, so fragile and empty and full and emphatic and strange. He constructed a foundation of energetic rigidity, a contradiction. As such, his chakra sought mass and material with a kind of second-hand intelligence. It spread away from his body quickly. It gathered and pulled at the moisture in the air, the sand that was not on the ground (except in that far away dystopia where he lay), but hungrily sought other things as well.

It devoured the odd physical forms crossing back and forth over the boat. It bit at motes of dust. The chakra sought out the original hardness of his own skin cells. It probed through and deeply beneath the multicolored water. All was imposed upon to re-arrange itself.

All was introduced into the swirling mineral chasm of the surrounding few feet. It created a barrier of transformation that solidified desire into action. This barrier represented Naitome's expanding energies. He watched a thin crystalline frame spread out. Everywhere that it met solid matter, or his idea of solid matter, it grew larger and darker.

Thin veins of translucent sand bridged out from their origin point at Naitome's feet. They were finding connections and settling. Naitome felt a palpable tension in the air. His chakra drained slowly into the forming of metal that lost its sheen and gained it in the same instant, beneath a sun that had long vortexed out of creation. The front end of the boat took on a strange glow as the steady forward motion it navigated primarily on its own, slowed and eventually halted.

Over the sides, he could see the same particulate iron attaching like seaweed from the waters. It was creating multiple fractured facets reflecting his surroundings. They would soon goad all around him into stillness. He was becoming slowly encased in a thin layer of his own creation. From random rock and moisture, from solid molecule to splintered ore to the stiff center of matter itself, his influence opened him to the fragility of existence, then hardened.

It was not real...but it was a dream....so it was real.

<sub>--| He cleared his mind of all unnecessary thoughts, letting a peculiar quiet evolve from his sense of satisfaction, allowing the dragon to recede into nothing. His hands began to expand and contract, forming pointless handseals as nothing more than shapes in the void of night. He still sat, his legs crossed, on the ground that was his training area as he envisioned the end form of what he hoped to accomplish. Mastery. This first training was purely about visualization. He'd imagined a black sphere of chakra in his earliest dreams, and now...now he could arrange that dream into reality.


As the chakra subtly rose within him, his thoughts drifted to a vision of the pyramid-like structures dotting the Kaze No Kuni coast he'd wandered as a child, collecting itself in mid-air, surrounding him. His muscles tensed in anticipation while his mind wandered. Negatively charged chakra was difficult to mold, and as it wasn't normally in the spectrum of magnetic force needed to create solid forms, even more difficult to envision. It was created through the manipulation of positive and negatively charged chakra particles melding into each other, but in a manner that allowed the negatively charged particle to take over. This wasn't balance, it was just more interruption, and his control would have to be up to the task.


This amalgamation of form and substance mixed with the absence of nature manipulation. This is what caused most shinobi to hesitate before attempting pure chakra techniques of an kind, but when combined with the inherent strengths of his kekkei genkai...the certainty of success was unknown. He'd seen firsthand, the only other Zantetsuken he'd ever known, Hirota, using nothing but magnetic entropy to repel or push whole caravans out of harms way. He wanted the same power. He wanted even more than that.

The chakra inside of his body raged. He could feel the faint sparks that rose form the positively charged particles. He could feel the coldness and absence of the negatively charged particles. Both floated throughout the air. They were tiny kinetic pops of energy attaching haphazardly to one another. His chakra reached out like a limb seeking to grasp and hold them together.


With great effort, he conjured a single flat square of chakra, which rose after being collected from various points on his tenketsu. It floated in front of him, while he stretched out his right arm and made a tight fist. The wall flattened even more, became rectangular as his fingers undulated above it It appeared as if they were communicating instructions, and the square grew larger and larger until it had formed a wall. This would be the first wall of the thought form bristling beneath his imagination. His left hand stretched out as well, sunk below the right, and formed a second fist, as the square tapered and narrowed off one of its edges.

He formed a lonely triangle of pure chakra, glistening brightly as the sun fell. Everywhere he looked was enveloped in darkness, save the pulsing light drifting off of the sliver of energy before him. The sword at his back seemed to lurch forwards, drawn, to a marvel of magnetism pouring into and out of the world.</sub>

<sub>--| He dispelled his chakra until all had grown quiet around him. He had to find a target, now that the rudimentary shape had finally been achieved. He focused on creating a tunnel, from his heart out to his hands. The heart was the focal point of chakra circulation throughout the body. He held on to the final ram seal once more, stubborn and unyielding, and he focused his vision to a tree twenty-five meters off in the distance.

He closed his eyes and visualized the dream-scape; a flat land expanse of perception and concept inundated with flow and ebb, like an ocean contained in the spaces of his head...the cold and warm currents of idea, the tiniest fragments of existence shattered against themselves as he was collected into a path of the dream pool divergent from want, this was purposeful intent and drive, motivation in the face of the surreal, an emotive echo of what was... opened them. Created.

He heard the air pressure shift around him. The ground swayed. His chakra began to filter mineral ore out of the very sand ground of the environment. As he slowly squinted, he saw that the dragon had quickly manifested in almost full completeness. There was a knot of pressure at its center as wings exploded outwards rapidly. Black beating impressions, like blades waving in the aether.

It extended its back end into a powdery tail that thrashed around and slapped against the ground. Pulses of magnetized waves gently rocked back and forth within the core. He saw bubbles of iron floating up throughout it while trapped air tried to escape. His eyes flickered over to the tree in the distance. As he raised his hand, he saw the dragon of iron beat its mass of wings slowly and rise a bit into the air, carried by his own energies.

He thrust his arm suddenly forward. The dragon took flight. Tiny collections of chakra and densely packed air seemed to evaporate out into the air as it flew. Its clawed hands outstretched and reached for the tree. It's iron tail snapped, and Naitome could feel the pull of chakra still connected to his hand and heart. With a dry soundless roar the dragon plunged the entirety of its body into the tree. Conflicting internal pressures ripped the tree apart, tore through the trunk like paper.

The iron sand used for the technique imploded around the destroyed piece of nature. It recollected around the other end, reforming the dragon's body from solely its chakra-based memory of shape. His manipulations seemed finally complete and with a heavy sigh, he allowed the chakra to float away back into the air. Silence returned as the dragon became a pile of dark grains behind the ruined surface of the tree.</sub>