"If I ever have a son, I want to raise him to be a shinobi like you, Naruto."
Facing the truth Uzumaki Naruto was desperate to say out loud, Namikaze Minato only spoke gently.
He did not say anything more.
Swept up by the Dragon Vein's power, Naruto and Yamato were pulled back to their own time.
In that era, only an instant had passed.
Sakura and Sai had barely escaped danger when they saw the two of them collapse to the ground.
And the memories of the past were gone, completely erased, like none of it had ever happened.
On the diary page, the video finally ended.
For a long moment, no one spoke. Their emotions surged so hard it stole their voices.
"Minato… in that final moment, you realized it, didn't you?" Jiraiya murmured.
Thinking back to Minato's expression at the end, it was obvious. He had to have guessed that Uzumaki Naruto was his son.
And if your own son did not recognize you, what else could that mean?
You were dead.
Even knowing the future probably ended with his own death, even facing a situation that cruel, Minato still chose to seal away his memories so his son could live.
That kind of calm willingness to step into death fit everything Jiraiya knew about him.
Minato was not the kind of shinobi who clung to life.
They would forget each other. Of course they would. But even so, for Minato, who died young, seeing his son once, even for a heartbeat, was probably a rare comfort.
Jiraiya's chest ached as he thought of that perfect, impossible disciple.
He made a silent vow on the spot.
Three days. No peeking at the bathhouse. In Minato's memory.
"The Fourth Hokage," Uchiha Itachi said softly, his voice barely carrying through the dim hideout. "A perfect Hokage… what a waste."
"Sensei… Obito…" Hatake Kakashi's thoughts drifted back into the past, as they always did when someone tugged on that thread.
The Third Hokage had pulled him out of Anbu specifically to make him step away from all of it.
Had he really?
Maybe a little. Not completely.
Most days, Kakashi did not let himself think about the people he had lost. But seeing Minato again dragged those memories up like a hook.
"No wonder I didn't remember any of it," Kakashi said quietly. "So sensei sealed my memories with fuinjutsu."
It finally clicked, the missing piece that made everything make sense.
"The Fourth Hokage… Namikaze Minato… dead-last…"
Uchiha Sasuke's feelings twisted into something messy and uncomfortable.
There was envy. There was jealousy. There was also a strange heaviness he could not name.
He was jealous that Naruto could go back and see his father, but when he really thought about it, Sasuke had at least gotten a childhood. Naruto had never seen his parents once, not from the day he was born.
And Naruto had lived like that, alone, for years.
By comparison… Sasuke had been lucky.
In Team 7, maybe only Sakura had grown up in a normal home.
Even Kakashi's background was miserable. Sasuke had heard the rumors. His mother had died early. His father had taken his own life when Kakashi was still a child.
The more Sasuke thought about it, the more complicated his mood became.
"A formula that twists time…" Sasuke whispered. "That really exists?"
While everyone else was still caught up in the aftershock, Kaede Kitahara was doing something entirely different.
He washed his hands, centered himself, and silently prayed, as if that would make luck lean his way.
Before leaving tomorrow, he still had one draw left.
"System," he said. "Start the draw."
A spinning wheel appeared in front of him.
The pointer whipped around so fast it blurred, then slowed, then clicked into place.
"Eight Gates Cultivation Essentials (Part One)"
Kaede froze, surprised he had pulled something like this.
Then the wheel vanished. A streak of golden light sank into his mind.
In an instant, the training method for the Eight Gates unfolded in his head, but only up through the first four.
The Eight Gates consisted of the Gate of Opening, the Gate of Healing, the Gate of Life, the Gate of Pain, the Gate of Limit, the Gate of View, the Gate of Wonder, and the Gate of Death.
What Kaede received covered only the first four: Gate of Opening, Gate of Healing, Gate of Life, and Gate of Pain.
"So it's not instant mastery this time," Kaede muttered, rubbing his chin. "It's just the method."
Looking back, his previous draws had been all over the place. Bloodlines. Physiques. jutsu. Explosive Tag. Even plain old money.
Bloodlines and physiques usually merged with him immediately. jutsu were almost always dumped straight into his brain, letting him use them as if he had trained for years. Flying Thunder God had been like that. Medical ninjutsu too.
But now he had the Eight Gates method and essentials for the first four gates.
What he lacked was practice.
If he trained a few times, he should be able to become proficient quickly, but proficiency was only the beginning.
The Eight Gates in Rock Lee's hands and the Eight Gates in Guy's hands were not even the same thing.
Kaede still remembered the shock of the first time he saw Rock Lee open four gates. Even Gaara, who had felt unstoppable in the early days, had been beaten so badly he nearly broke.
But that was the peak of Rock Lee's glory. After that, he vanished for a long time.
Even late into the story, all the way to Naruto and Hinata's wedding, Lee still did not match Guy's level. When a meteor fell, Lee could only open up to the sixth gate.
Early on, Lee was praised as a hardworking genius. Later, everyone realized the truth.
The important part of "hardworking genius" was the hardworking, not the genius.
Lee had talent in taijutsu, sure, but only some. Against people who were clearly more gifted, no amount of effort could fully close the gap.
That was the tone of the entire world.
At first, it talked about effort. Later, it admitted effort mattered, but talent mattered more.
And later still, even talent stopped mattering.
Bloodline mattered most.
So many shinobi were brilliant. Hatake Kakashi, Konoha's Number One Technician. Sarutobi Hiruzen, the Third Hokage with chakra natures across the board. Orochimaru, the greatest scientist among Hokage-level figures. Uchiha Itachi, the dutiful son.
All of them were exceptional.
And what did it get them?
In front of bloodline, exceptional still hit a ceiling.
Without Otsutsuki blood, without that kind of ancient inheritance, being talented was not enough.
Kaede exhaled.
"Still… this is pretty good," he decided. "I don't have the later gates yet, but what I've got is already useful."
The Eight Gates were a technique that let ordinary people fight against fate. In a world obsessed with lineage, if you did not have a powerful bloodline, you had almost no chance against those alien monsters.
If you had the Eight Gates, you could at least claw back a little.
Opening the seventh gate let Guy, at elite jonin level, beat down a Kage Level monster like Hoshigaki Kisame. Opening the eighth gate had kicked Uchiha Madara so hard he was almost taken out of the story entirely.
In the early stage of this world, it was absolutely a terrifying technique.
If you did not fear death, you could jump from Chunin to jonin, from Kage Level to Super Kage Level.
Six Paths Level was the one exception, because Six Paths Level had already stepped outside what counted as human.
It was beyond humanity.
The Sage of Six Paths had been dead physically, yet his soul still existed in the Pure Land. Did that count as human?
Otsutsuki Kaguya had been trapped deep inside the moon for ages. Did that count as human?
Someone who could create a moon with Chibaku Tensei, did that count as human?
Being human was too hard.
So Kaede decided he would stop being human.
He wanted to try training the Eight Gates, but not inside the village.
Luckily, across various missions, he had buried plenty of Flying Thunder God kunai in different places. He closed his eyes and focused.
In the next instant, he appeared in a quiet, remote forest outside the village, with no one around.
Following the essentials now engraved in his mind, Kaede immediately began pushing for the first gate.
The Gate of Opening.
"Gate of Opening… open!"
He shouted, and under the control of his will, chakra surged through him and smashed through the first gate.
A burst of green chakra flared around his body.
In a short span of time, his chakra output jumped by thirty percent.
"Only thirty percent?" Kaede paused, surprised. It did not look as dramatic as when Rock Lee opened his gates.
But percentage was not the whole story.
Kaede's base chakra was already comparable to a typical Kage Level shinobi. Even a thirty percent increase was massive. That was several jonin worth of chakra stacked on top of each other.
More importantly, he was not feeling the damage described in the Eight Gates essentials, the way that massive chakra pressure was supposed to tear at muscles and meridians, making it impossible to keep the gates open for long.
If you held the gates too long, it was supposed to cause irreversible damage.
Even in canon, when Lee opened the gates, his chakra surge was visible, violent, explosive.
Kaede looked at his body, almost untouched, and narrowed his eyes.
"Is it because I merged with the Uzumaki Clan's early-stage Sage Body?"
It was the only explanation he could think of.
That, and the Uchiha Clan bloodline he had fused as well. Compared to someone like Rock Lee, Kaede's physique was in a completely different category.
Lee struggled to bear the strain of opening gates for long.
Kaede did not.
He could feel it clearly. With only the Gate of Opening active, he could maintain it for a long time.
According to the essentials, opening the first gate removed the brain's limiter, allowing the body to use one hundred percent of its physical ability. It burned through energy at an extreme rate, pushing attack power and speed far past normal limits.
Both his strength and his speed rose sharply.