In other words, once you opened the Gate of Opening, you were forcing your body to use one hundred percent of its power across the board. That kind of all-in approach left you no retreat, and it was also the reason the Eight Gates tended to burn out fast in a prolonged fight.
At the same time, it proved something else.
Kaede Kitahara's chakra reserves still hadn't reached their true ceiling. They'd been capped.
Right after that, Kaede barked out another shout, guiding Chakra as he slammed into the next gate.
The Gate of Healing.
In an instant, a surge far larger than before flooded out of him, completely unleashed.
Kaede glanced down at his hands. The faint fatigue he'd felt a moment ago vanished like it had never existed. With the Gate of Healing open, it felt like his body was squeezing out energy nonstop, forcing every cell to shoulder a heavier workload to offset the consumption caused by the Eight Gates.
At this point, his chakra had already increased by fifty percent over his original level.
"Again. Gate of Life, open!"
He roared and drove straight into the Gate of Life. His chakra spiked violently, and compared to what he normally had, it had doubled.
His heartbeat sped up. Even his skin, which had barely changed before, started to flush, pale with a reddish heat underneath. It was still much better than what happened to Rock Lee when he opened the Gate of Life, that frightening, feral red, but the change was there.
Kaede's breathing turned faintly ragged. The Eight Gates' strain on the body was becoming something he could actually feel now. You could not keep wringing your body dry like this forever, not with willpower alone.
The first three gates were basically the Eight Gates' safety zone. Up to this point, it would not cause irreversible damage. But from the fourth gate onward, things changed. Speed and strength would rise again, but the body would start taking real harm. That was when you truly stepped into the territory of the Eight Gates.
"Gate of Pain, open!"
Kaede shouted. His body turned even redder, and a haze of vaporized energy swirled around him, green mixed with red. Thin cracks began to appear across the surface of his skin.
It wasn't severe yet, but for Kaede, it was still shocking.
In the blink of an eye, he vanished from where he stood. When he appeared again, he was already hundreds of meters away, inside the forest.
He didn't stop. He kept testing.
In the Gate of Pain state, even a casual punch or kick carried absurd power, like he'd just fired off a B-rank ninjutsu without even trying.
For a taijutsu specialist, this was the closest thing to a god-tier technique.
After a short while, Kaede finally stopped. He released the Eight Gates and returned to his usual state, but the damage was obvious. Cracks ran across multiple parts of his skin, and several muscles had torn.
He didn't immediately use healing ninjutsu. Instead, he let his body repair itself on its own. He wasn't only probing the Eight Gates' limits. He was also testing how far his flesh could go, and how quickly it could recover.
It wasn't comparable to Uzumaki Naruto's monstrous regeneration, but it was still far better than an ordinary person's. If a normal shinobi took this kind of damage, they'd be stuck in bed for ten days to half a month.
Kaede could already feel his skin knitting back together. The torn muscle fibers were slowly regrowing, reconnecting, fusing.
"At this speed, even without recovery-type techniques, I'll be mostly fine in half an hour. No obvious aftereffects," Kaede said, assessing his condition. "The Eight Gates really are something. With four gates open, my chakra increases by about one hundred and fifty percent over my base. That's like gaining the equivalent of one and a half extra Kage Level reserves out of thin air. In a fight, that boost is enormous. The problem is, this chakra is forcibly squeezed out in a short burst. It can't be stored long-term. It only exists for combat."
He paused, thinking it through.
"Based on what I saw with the fourth gate, as long as I'm not taking heavy damage, I can keep the Gate of Pain active for more than half an hour in battle."
He was satisfied with that increase. His chakra was already terrifying by normal standards, and adding another one hundred and fifty percent on top of it was ridiculous.
With four gates maintained, a casual punch from him produced a shockwave that wasn't much weaker than a B-rank Wind Release ninjutsu.
It was a shame he didn't have any techniques developed specifically for the Eight Gates, things like the Front Lotus, Reverse Lotus, or Daytime Tiger. If he did, the destructive power would be even more absurd.
Kaede couldn't help feeling a little amazed. If he hadn't gotten this diary before, he probably would have died before he ever learned the Eight Gates. Rock Lee was proof enough of that. After training under Guy for a full year, Lee's body had only just become strong enough to open up to the fourth gate.
And Lee's daily training volume was enough to make even Kaede's scalp go numb.
Meanwhile, Kaede had learned four gates in barely any time at all.
The truth was, the Eight Gates weren't difficult because the technique itself was complex. They were just eight points in the body. Break through a point, and you temporarily remove the limiter. The principle wasn't hard.
Once you knew the method, the training itself wasn't the problem.
The real difficulty was having a body strong enough to release them.
Most shinobi couldn't even open the first gate. Their bodies simply couldn't support it.
Once the Eight Gates opened, they demanded energy from the body in a brutal, greedy way. If your constitution was even slightly lacking, you would probably pass out on the spot, and that was before you even talked about the later gates.
For that year Rock Lee trained under Guy, most of his time was probably spent building the physical foundation needed to even qualify for Eight Gates cultivation.
And with every gate after that, the requirements climbed higher and higher, until you could withstand a kick powerful enough to kill a Super Kage Level monster.
Even if it was only for that single kick, it was still an unprecedented glory. A mortal body, peeking into a corner of a god's domain.
"But it's still too slow," Kaede thought. "In a real fight, it's not practical enough."
Sure, he could open the Eight Gates now, but if the activation was too slow, it was inconvenient in actual combat.
This wasn't some polite one-on-one in the Chunin Exams. In real combat, no one was going to stand there and watch him power up. The moment they saw the wind-up for a big move, they would do everything they could to stop him.
Only if he could reach the point of instant activation would the Eight Gates truly have combat value.
There was another option too. If he could reach the sixth gate, the Gate of View, he could hold himself in a half-open buffer state. Keep the green aura from the Gate of Opening active while leaving the body largely unchanged, reducing consumption and strain. Then, when he needed it, he could explode into full combat power in an instant.
But to learn the Gate of View, he would have to wait for his next system draw.
It was like Flying Thunder God. When he pulled it, the system dumped the technique straight into his brain, but it still had no real combat value. Only after he gained matching space-time talent did everything click, the parts he couldn't understand suddenly becoming clear, and the parts he couldn't grasp finally making sense.
Even then, by Kaede's estimate, he would at best reach the Second Hokage Senju Tobirama's practical level. He was still nowhere near the Fourth Hokage's kind of freedom, the level where Flying Thunder God Second Step could be used like a toy.
Still, Kaede's thoughts turned in another direction.
"If I can keep the Eight Gates in a normal, always-on state… then it's like I'm training at the extreme nonstop."
The first three gates were the safe zone. There were consequences, but no irreversible damage. Outside of battle, he could use them as a way to temper himself.
Once he got used to keeping three gates open as a normal state, opening the fourth later would be even stronger.
On top of that, Kaede's chakra refinement was only maintained at a normal level because his body was still growing rapidly. Even at "normal," the rate his chakra increased was enough to make ninety-nine percent of people jealous.
Kage Level was only his starting point. It was nowhere near the limit of the Uzumaki Clan's Sage Body.
But if he made opening the Eight Gates a constant habit, he could accelerate that growth dramatically. And the Uzumaki Clan's Sage Body meant it was difficult for him to leave irreversible injuries behind in the first place. His recovery was terrifying.
"Then I'll start by making the Gate of Opening a normal state," Kaede said. "Gate of Opening, open!"
The moment he spoke, the huge chakra surge flared again. He had simply removed his body's limiter, allowing himself to draw out one hundred percent of his power.
It was his own chakra in the first place, so what he needed to do was stabilize it, merge it into his body, and stop it from exploding outward in such a loud, attention-grabbing way.
"This is still too slow," Kaede decided. "Ninjutsu: Multi-Shadow Clone Technique!"
With a shout, he created a large swarm of Shadow Clone Technique copies.
"Your task is to compress the chakra fluctuations caused by opening the Gate of Opening down to the smallest possible level. I'm going back to sleep."
"Hey, that's not fair, original!" the clones immediately complained. "You're making us do the hard labor again!"
Training all night, suffering through it as clones, doing the grind while the real body rested. It was worse than being worked like a draft animal.
Kaede ignored them. He used Flying Thunder God and teleported back home.
By now, his chakra was almost completely drained.
Of course, that was because his chakra had been evenly distributed to the clones. He hadn't left much for himself.
He needed proper rest. Tomorrow morning, he still had to head out to Roran's ancient ruins and check whether the seal was intact.
He'd prepared himself mentally for it, but early the next morning, when the clones dispelled and their fatigue slammed back into him all at once, the exhaustion hit so hard his vision swam. He nearly blacked out on the spot.
Kaede forced himself to stay conscious. Yawning as he went, he stumbled out of the house.
