With their first mission done and dusted, they settled into a new, less ordered schedule.
Due to the naturally unpredictable nature of missions, alongside the higher exhaustion resulting from them, they went from a weekly routine to a far more flexible monthly one.
They would try to have either three or four missions a month, with about 10 training days nestled between them.
Instead of setting days for each one, it varied based on the difficulty of their most recent mission and if their teacher felt they could benefit from some self-guided training.
And in this manner...
... three goddamn months passed with little incident.
To call the three of them bored was an understatement.
Or, more accurately, two of them, as Kusuri spent those three months in what he considered to be a quite enjoyable manner.
While their day-to-day activities were anything but fascinating, the addition of missions caused one major change: it put money in their pockets.
With money, Kusuri was now able to properly pursue some of his research ventures. He could acquire notebooks, scrolls, ink, and whatever else he needed.
He had three major research pathways he intended to follow for the foreseeable future, which were as follows: First, deconstruct the fully developed jutsu he had learned from various teachers to fill in his understanding of the inner workings of ninjutsu; second, reexamine and rework the jutsu he had attempted to reverse engineer to get them closer to the original; and third, use whatever insights he had gleaned from the previous two steps to flesh out his homemade techniques to get them in working order, as while they were technically complete, as they objectively did what he designed them to do, they didn't do a very good job of it. At all.
How long it would take to fulfill his goals, he did not know, but what he did know is that it would not be immediate, and thus began his project by doing incredibly boring logistical preparation.
He spent nearly his first entire free day structuring his notebooks. Numbering the pages, preparing places to put important information and experimental data, and preserving some space for later use as a glossary and/or table of contents.
It was simple, repetitive, and deeply uninteresting, but it was a necessity if he wanted to have his data be easily cataloged and, most of all, referenceable, when the time came. It would've been easier with a computer, of course, but he hadn't exactly seen many of those and had no intention of building one.
After the basics were done, he could finally move on to his first actual research. It was a lot more work than just reading scrolls, but in his eyes, it was far, far more fulfilling.
He began with what was arguably the simplest jutsu he knew: water bullet.
He decided to go with water bullet for exactly the reason one might expect.
While it was technically classified as a C-Rank jutsu, that was only because of its high chakra requirements due to the need to produce your own water. If it had a more manageable chakra requirement its complexity would likely stick it at a mid to low D-Rank.
The jutsu consisted of three parts: water production, propulsion, and direction. They were the most basic components of any Water Release ninjutsu, no matter the rank. Since, in this case, they were the only components, that meant Kusuri would get what was just about the most unadulterated look at them he could get.
And trying to get a look at them was exactly what he did during his first two weeks.
By the end of that second week, he had finally cracked it.
It was frankly a bit disheartening to him that it took as long as it did, but as he moved onto the rest of the techniques he had been taught, he could tell just how much it had opened the gates.
In the next two weeks, the same time it took for him to decompile Water Bullet alone, he decompiled Making Waves, and Diving Bell, the two other Jutsu he got from teachers, as well as Syrup Trap, which he bribed off one of the two guys always guarding the main gate. As for which one of them it was, he genuinely didn't remember.
Either way, the increase in his speed had been exponential with each one dissected.
Keeping his streak going, he managed to finish analyzing his three medical ninjutsu, Power Rush, Healing Palm, and Acupressure in a further 2 weeks. Kusuri was quite surprised he had finished in the time he did considering few things carried over from Water Release, but the scrolls did have a lot of stuff on medical ninjutsu so he supposed it canceled out.
With medical ninjutsu finished, he had spent roughly a month and a half just to get through the jutsu he had been taught.
Despite the time it took, it lit a fire in his stomach, because it meant he could move on to things that would actually make a difference in his capabilities as a ninja.
Step 2 was much simpler than step 1, if only due to smaller volume, as he had only attempted to reverse engineer two techniques, those being Hidden Mist and Chakra Scalpels.
Still, despite that, getting them to near full power took most of another month.
In Kusuri's eyes, however, it was time very well spent.
The Hidden Mist technique had enormous tactical value, especially as an escape method, and as for chakra scalpels, Kusuri thought they were cool as hell.
With that, it was time for his pet projects.
He used as much free time as he could get to get them to, if not perfection, at least viability.
He spent two weeks working on every aspect of them, working on every kink, inefficiency, and problem he could find, but before he could get them to the point he'd call them finished, a disruption to Team 9's schedule arrived.
Their teacher made the announcement during one of their normal training sessions, right after they finished their lunch.
They were to go on their first C-Rank Mission.
And unbeknownst to them.
It was going to be much more than they bargained for.