Who knew Breathing could be so complex?

(warning: unconventional training ahead, I promise the musing about how the tech works is less than half of the wc )

Kohei clapped loudly, the sound ringing onto the night time air.

An awkward silence ensued.

He frowned, then clapped once more.

While an observer might have expected him to suddenly say “Open Sesame!” or to make snarky comments with more slow applauding, his actual intent was far different.

What kind of wind jutsu requires a hand clap, anyway? Sure, earth often involved such, but this was accompanied by a double palm press to the ground. Wind, well, this was a first. Evidently this was a more uncommon way of manipulating wind chakra, or Kohei would have noticed in the village jutsu applications he waded through before, when designing academy curricula.

This one did, and it was supposed to have some pretty powerful effects. It was not so much an attack, as a self enhancement. Yuppers.

He clapped again, this time more evidently breathing. Previously, he had been trying to  just manipulate the chakra, but apparently he needed to do the breath too. See, some things just don't work well when broken down into stages. They rely on something more than being the sun of the parts. Sum, rather. So he was going to need to put more effort into this.

He sat down, in the middle of his hideout, and breathed deeply in. Meditating had its benefits, chief among them, the capability to inhale deeply. Very deeply. While falling into a trance. It was night time after all, you can't really blame Kohei for dozing off because he was sleepy, you try meditating some time!

He started awake, and realized he had wasted some time. Can't have that, he needed to be on the move. So his next breath was deep and quick, his body accepting the gift of oxygen from the air, and pervading it through his body. Instead of directing the air into his lungs, he tried to force it past more quickly, trying to get a higher proportion of oxygen in his blood stream or some thing. This is harder than it sounds. For one thing, you were supposed to be bypassing the lungs, which were the natural gateway into the rest of the body for the gases he had inhaled.

How ever, from the understanding of biology that Kohei had, which should be some what applicable despite this being a ninja world and all, the air could not be just forced past the lungs straight to the blood stream. Rather, the lungs were the actual gate way into the blood stream, attempting to bypass this implied that one would try to cut a hole into an artery or some thing dumb like that. No, what was probably meant, was that the oxygen was forcefully pushed into the lungs, and through the capillaries, in an attempt to force a higher rate of diffusion of oxygen being exchanged in to the blood stream. As a result of that, the blood would have more oxygen, which would presumably enhance the effectiveness of the muscles in the user’s body. From there, the user’s body would become more energy efficient or produce more or convert more oxygen into physical energy or some thing, and that would cause the user to end up with more chakra than normal.

Jesus. He was starting to wax metaphysical or some thing. Any ways, that was probably how the user “surpassed” their limits, so to speak. They boosted their energy out put by forcefully accommodating extra oxygen into their body. This tacitly required concentration of no small significance, between that and the unusual amount of strain on one’s lungs, this would actually use up a fair amount of stamina, despite making the body run more efficiently. The initial breath of air that was larger than normal, was probably to help get the process kick started. The inner ponderer in Kohei wondered what percentage of oxygen was outputted from his body when he exhaled, using this technique. And would this be the same for everyone? Because proportionally, you know, the stronger ninjas might have more oxygen demanding muscles, and so would this form of self enhancement give less oxygen, proportionally speaking, but the same linearly? Or was it the inverse? He wished he could find out, it was exactly this kind of silly question that kept him up late at night, training so he could fall asleep from exhaustion instead of by normal means.

From what he remembered though, it did seem that this technique required some noticeable affinity with the wind element. Why was a matter for debate. After all, normal breathing did little to harm the body, unless it was a dangerous activity like smoking, but with a guaranteed kill after eighty or so years, not that many ninjas lived that long, or that there were many ninjas who would consent to such a study on their bodies, anyway. Oops, he definitely did not get distracted and dragged off of his previous train of thought or some thing, did he? As he was sa- err, thinking, what if instead, the technique boosted ones capactiy by approximately the same amount for every individual who used it? I mean, a stronger ninja who is twice as fast doesn’t take twice as large a breath, their lungs are not twice the size right? What happens there? And besides, it is not like a powerful ninja would be likely to think to increase the size of their alveoli, bronchioles, or cappillaries. What did you think they were, biology majors? Speaking of which, most people who are not science and biology nuts should not feel bad about looking up what those were, doctors perhaps excepted. Those are hardly used in a ninja’s every day language. Heck, Kohei had to look up what those were, when he wanted to know how this Wind Rejunevation technique actually worked, since he might have wanted to try to optimize the technique later on, for a series of decidedly non-altruistic and definitely self serving purposes. Obviously, all this quibbling about the manners in which the technique actually enhanced the body by basically taking a deeper breath, formed more a question for a medical ninja, one who was also proficient in the sciences. Who knows, maybe Kohei would be able to come out of this dilemma with a greater understanding of how everything in this ninja universe works, since there were… many inconsistencies. While he was at it, maybe he could figure out what gave people affinities to specific elements. And don’t just say that it was about genes. Obviously to some degree there was an element of nurture as well. Time to sneak back on to the topic of learning and practicing the Wind style: Rejunevation technique, before some one else who might or might not have been monioring his training session, realized that he had taken a break from actual training, to start musing about some what irrelevant possibilities, at least, irrelevant for his specific and current purposes.

Though it was a bit funny to imagine one’s alveoli as rubber balloons, with little particles passing through the stretched membranes into the capillaries. Imagine trying to explain this to those in the ninja academy. That would take nerves of steel, and the patience of a thousand sages. Especially if he tried to explain about possibly messing with the diffusion rate, rather than increasing the amount of immediately available oxygen to diffuse into the blood stream…. Ok, seriously, time to focus, or he would not get any real training in, and that would be unfortunate.

Still kneeling, he took a real breath, and tried to not muse over what could happen, and why. Reaching inside him self with his chakra, he tried to cram air into his blood stream. Well, as it turns out, the process is a little more subtle than that. For one thing, that really, REALLY hurt, because he basically just pushed part of his lung out, compressing a bunch of rather sensitive flesh with other purpose besides being a punching bag for an inept fool’s klutziness.Yeah. Back to the drawing board.

For one thing, he obviously had not differentiated enough between the oxygen he was trying to grab, the regular air which was minding its own business thank you very much, and the carbon dioxide that he should be trying to remove. If his chakra was going to be helpful, he would need to find a way to enhance the accumulation and distribution of the former, a general lack of interference from the second, and rapid evacuation of the tertiary. That would be hard though, since we are kind of talking about sensing and manipulating individual atoms here. Perhaps there was a simpler approach that could be tried first?

Hmmm….

He thought about this for a bit, before having an idea.

What if he were to merely enhance his current breathing. Would that be enough, with the knowledge he already had?

Time to find out.

He took a deep breath, but this time he tried to suck in more air than normal, by grabbing it sort of, with his chakra. It is hard to conceive exactly how that happens, but trust the narrator here, it did. If it helps, just say that he was surrounding pockets of air with his chakra and slightly compressing the air into his lungs, more than the norm for when one took a breath. As time passed, he would expand on this method, slowly improving the amount of air he crushed into his lungs. Honestly, he could go quite far with this, in some ways, because air is very easy to compress, compared to a typical liquid. So he could put in extra air for a good while without noticing any serious ill effect. Oh, sure, he did get a bit woozy at first, not used to this increase in air he was sort of breathing, but that passed after a few minutes. It was a good thing it was quiet outside, the noise would have distracted him. It was like wise good that the air was a bit clearer outside at night, because there were fewer pollutants being knocked up into the air, for the most part. After all, he was taking in more air than normal, it was fair to assume that he would be more susceptible to the effects of the airborne contaminants. So yeah, good thing those cart horses were asleep for the day. He wondered if he would smell more too. He didn’t want to have to test this out. Actually… he could.

He got up from his perch, and strolled out from his hideout thingy, looking for grub. He was still taking extra large breaths, and he seriously wished that this technique had been worded differently so that he could do training that was more his usual style, but what ever, the narrator digresses. There was a noodle shop near the contract center, they were often open late at night, especially Saturdays. They could be open and he might get to know whether his sense of smell would be affected by this. I mean, he IS taking a bigger breath, and you sort of smelled with the same air that you tasted, right? Maybe he was off a bit, but who knows. He would, shortly. At least, the molecule receptors within the nose and on the tongue were pretty much the same, and the air passages between the nose and the mouth definitely connected somehow? Ok, this part of the anatomy class he had not paid enough attention to that part. He would have to look it up later. For now though, he walked down the street, the sounds of a restaurant approaching.

Evidently, they were in business this night. Some times they were not, because one of their customers was having a rough day and was caught doing some thing illegal, but not this night. It would serve perfectly to let Kohei’s query rest. He tried taking the chakra enhanced breath again, this time within scent range of the noodle shop. He got a whiff of some thing. What was i- ergh!

Evidently, they were training some one new to this idea of cooking. If he didn’t know better, given their reputation, he would have assumed they badly burned a pot of noodles with some explosively scented materials embedded in the vile mix. Really, some one seemed to have a negative talent for cooking here, hopefully it was not a replacement cook and just a junior. That SMELLED hard to clean, let alone eat.

He stopped taking chakra enhanced breaths as he approached. One of the cooks had a Byakugan and would definitely know if he was using a jutsu. Best to remain neutral here. He was glad he had done so as he approached, curious to see what caused the smell, his decreased breathing reducing the amount of unpleasant odor he was experiencing for a while, at least until he got a lot closer. Evidently his query could be put to rest now. He would have helped deal with the struggling miscreants but the cooks had things well under way. Apparently burning hair was the awful stench he had woefully experienced earlier. No midnight snacks for him this time.

He headed back to his hideout, making sure he was not being tailed. So apparently his sense of smell would be better when he used this technique. That was good. He slowly, over the walk home, made a series of further attempts along this line of inquiry, focusing on improving the amount of air that he could take in at one time. Gosh, he was starting to feel a tad heavier, from swallowing so much air now. Or was that his imagination?

One weigh in on the bathroom scale indicated that there was no significant weight change. Not like his chakra enhanced breathing was going to add several actual pounds of air to his mass, and his lungs weren’t that big, probably just average for an average sized dude. Oh well.

Actually, that was good. Even if toxins and other such pollutants and airborne hazards such as flying waterfalls could be a greater danger, at least he was not going to be any slower than before.

Come to think of it, he was supposed to be faster, and his chakra based techniques stronger as well, right? That was kind of the point of this jutsu after all? He would have tried it out, but he did not actually have a regulated jutsu that he could test the latter with to make sure that he output the same jutsu power and speed as before, or higher. Truly unfortunate. He could get a sense of whether the jutsu was helping perhaps, if he were to go and do some basic elemental manipulation, and see what the same amount of effort got him compared to what he remembered of before.

Yes, that sounded like the best plan. He still needed to make the speed increase work out though. After he maximized the breathing part. Figuring that he could maximise his breathing, and take a brisk walk back to his hideout to get used to it in the process, he stood still, making sure nobody was trailing him, his breath beginning to heave in and out in great massive gasps. Normally this would have meant he was tired, but this time he could legitimately claim to be training. Pretty funny considering that normally a few pushups could set Kohei out of breath. RIP. If he had any friends, they might have been surprised. Oh well.

His breathing increasing in both scale and pace, he felt it was about time to try out his speed. He had to think a bit to figure out how to move quicker, his muscles were capable of more movement now which he was completely unused to. While it could have been assumed that his muscles would just put forth the usual amount of effort as before - make no mistake, this was certainly true - he was mentally used to travelling at specific speeds, and as such, was unconsciously limiting his own pace, reducing the speed, length, and power of his own strides until they felt “natural”, so to speak. So he had to not do that. To get used to the idea of moving faster than normal, he tried springing to a nearby tree.

He wasn’t sure why, but his reactions and awareness were much faster as well. Even though he was running about 6 to 8 times as fast as normal, his reaction speed was only about twice as fast tops, this speed difference perhaps explaining how a D rank missing ninja ran straight into a tree. Face first. Full speed.

Yeah.

That kind of thing hurt, especially when you were not very tough in the first place.

He fell into a daze, and only recovered after some time, realizing he was lying flat on his back on the ground. Sitting up, he rubbed the back of his head ruefully, only realizing he had fallen on his back at first. As it turned out, he eventually remembered what had happened, and realized the tree must have been a bit springy, this both saving him from greater damage, and springing him backwards after the initial impact.

Well, at least he had a better idea of how fast he could go with the chakra enhanced breaths. He would try again to use his newfound speed, but keep a better control over his body this time. He got up, and walked to a more clear section of the path, and tried running towards his hide out again, after the clap used to boost his chakra and kickstart the breathing process, followed by the deep breath itself.

This time went a bit better, until he made the mistake of looking down at his feet to marvel at his newfound wings, so to speak, when he was not used to running at a faster speed. Abruptly, his legs began to slow down, because he was not able to move like that subconsciously, and like wise for the breathing. As a result, he tumbled through several errant patches of tall grass, rolling to a stop against a cart.Which he hit his head on. Knocking a number of items off of the cart, many of them landing on him. Fortunately, they weren’t ALL pots and pans, some were… culinary confections. Meaning that some one was going to wake up to a rather massive mess of what was either merchandise, or exceptionally open travelling kits. Like wise, someone else was likely to have a rather hefty cleaning bill if the damage to his clothing was as bad as he thought. Some types of jam had this way of permanently staining ones clothing. Though, with his potentially higher speed, he might have been able to clean it off? Who knows, it was worth a shot.

He grunted, as one last pebble fell off and bounced off his forehead. He might have a shiner or two in the morning from one of the mean looking kettles that had fallen. Fortunately, they fell around him, and a number of the softer items, like food, had fallen first, so he was some what shielded from the initial impact.

Some time later, he would reflect back on this, and consider this to be some of the weirdest training he had ever done. Heavy breathing. Cleaning clothing. Rapidly, as if he actually wanted to do it. That would have been a first, but sadly, no. Kohei was still training, or what ever this actually counted as, by undergoing that breathing technique, the Wind Rejuvenation style thingy or whatever. God, he hated those names. Couldn’t they be more descriptive? Not sure why some people felt the need to call this stuff out as they fought, seemed like bad policy to him. Anyways, he had done the obligatory chakra kickstart, aka a hand clap, then started using his increased speed to scrub faster, making use of his stronger chakra by blasting it with more wind air chakra stuff, and dampening the clothing, you guessed it, with chakra. So yeah. Odd little training situation here. Scrub a dub dub dub.

He was breathing heavily, sucking in the extra oxygen and what not, and the tub of water was having its liquid sloshing at the edges, in danger of causing a spill all the time. Fortunately, he had a speed boost and the water did not, so he was usually able to prevent actual spillage by shifting the tub quickly, his breathing quick for a reason besides his training, for a few moments. For a little bit, he was not sure if his increased rubbing speed had been about to slosh half of the tub of water out onto the grass, forcing him to walk back to collect more water. As it turned out, this too he was able to catch, by physically hauling the tub over to catch the water after it began its downward descent. Whew.

He stopped, since this was a bit nerve wracking for him - a fact that is easily misunderstood until one knows that Kohei is a bit like a cat - he really hates getting his fur, err, clothing, wet. That being said, his pants that he had been wearing earlier still needed scrubbing. Unfortunately, he was tired still, but he was going to clean that damn stain out if it took him all day! He hurriedly set to work scrubbing, burning his fingers a bit at first since he was used to letting them brush against the cloth when at a lower speed. Urk. Eventually, tired, he collapsed in his hideout, dog tired.

The next morning, he awoke. The first contract he got, was basically a courier service, taking some bloody packages from one gang to another. Ugh. Yuk! He suspected, from the size, that he knew exactly what the packages were, but he played dumb any way. Good thing too, because the recipient was pretty mad when they opened up the small box, a bit less than a foot across on each side. As it turned out, the breathing technique he was practicing came in handy here too, that Wind Rejuvenation technique, since the controlled breathing helped reduce stress, and the enhanced speed helped him to move a lot faster, throwing off a lot of calculated pounces and knife tosses that he was suddenly able to outrun. Ok, maybe not every time, some of those guys were decently tough for normal people, but he was able to run far enough that the knife hit something else, like another attacker, embedded itself in a wall instead of his body, or merely plummeted because of gravity. A few onlookers caught on, and a couple of times he had to screech to a halt, or run on the ceiling or something all of a sudden, just to avoid some of the more expertly thrown knives.This technique was tiring though, and he collapsed soon after escaping the gangster’s den. It had worked to his benefit that there were many hallways in there, often he had been able to run by in his enhanced speed without even being noticed, until he was several meters down the hallway, that is. As it was, he looked like mostly a blur to many.

That being said, it took him twice as long as normal to get back to the contract center, to claim his reward. And that was with a walking stick! For the most part, he was not harassed on the way back, allowing him to think over the process of using the Wind Rejuvenation technique again, after practicing it so many… unconventional… ways. Hopefully not all the techniques were this painfully simply, it had been a real hastle to spend so long training a simple tech that largely revolved around enhanced breathing, and dealing with a significant increase in speed, both of which kind of got boring real fast. Oh well. At least the technique would be useful, especially if he learned wind techniques

(exit)

(ttl wc: 4011)
(claiming +20 stats, and http://naruto-role-play-rpg.forumotion.com/t34026-wind-style-wind-rejuvination?highlight=wind+rejuvenation )

I am legitimately impressed that you managed to write 4k about breathing. 

An approval and a +1 for your efforts, good sir.