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They didn't do much sleeping.
Neji was out like a stone; Hinata spent half the night worrying herself awake.
By morning, faint redness ringed her eyes something Hanabi noticed immediately, waiting outside with a catlike grin.
She shot Neji a look that said I know everything, then chirped, "Rest up, Neji-nii!" and spirited her sister away.
Neji flicked Hanabi's forehead on her way out. She pouted and fled anyway.
He watched the sisters go, exhaled. Planned to spend the day with Hinata… another time. Let her rest.
He locked the door, dropped into the base below, left a phantom running the cover systems then vanished.
…
The desert swallowed sound. Rōran was a grave of sun-bleached bones: toppled spires, sand-choked streets, a civilization reduced to wind and memory.
Neji walked through the ruins in silence. Twenty years. That's all it takes for a kingdom to become a rumor.
A column of purple light erupted skyward, warping the air with a low, aching hum.
Time itself seemed to rattle. In Neji's mindscape, the "lion head" subpage, its chains draped around a sand-filled hourglass, shuddered. Color bled along one chain, ink spreading over stone.
A hairline crack.
Then another.
The chain snapped like glass shards dissolving into golden motes and sinking into the hourglass. Nearby chains quivered, then stilled again.
The carved lion's eyes flickered, then went dark. Only the hourglass glowed faintly one band of sand now bright gold.
"Not enough," Neji muttered, watching the pillar falter. "I need more time… literally."
The beam winked out. Team Kakashi flickered back into the world where it had stood, all four wearing the foggy look of dreamers just after waking.
They remembered something: a girl, a city, a blade worn thin by years, but the details slid away like sand between fingers. Their target was gone. So was the path. They turned for home, leaving their questions to the wind.
Neji dropped from above as their silhouettes vanished.
If only.
Born too early, born too late the timing was never ours to choose.
He stepped into the sealed heart of the old city: the Dragon Vein's shrine. The floor was stenciled with Fourth Hokage sigils, kunai embedded like nails in the world's skin.
"Minato's seal," Neji murmured. "Good enough to buy a generation. Never enough to last forever."
He studied the lattice of ink and geometry, then pressed his palm to a node. A seam opened just a breath and the Dragon Vein's chakra surged for that single exit like a flood through a crack.
His Tenseigan flared cerulean.
A whirlpool of pull formed in his hand.
Chakra roared toward him, but the seal's cage turned the scramble into a choke. The more it struggled, the more it fed him. He closed his eyes and sank inward. Inside the system's UI, the lion-head subpage "Time-Space" drank in glittering threads. The hourglass brightened; the chains around the icon stained to full color at a sprint.
Purple-black ripples of timestream energy sloughed off the Dragon Vein and poured into the hourglass. Sand flashed gold.
Chains rattled loud enough to feel in his teeth. Cracks spidered, links burst, scatter-light fell like fireflies into the glass.
Stone flaked from the subpage's border, chunks peeling and slipping into the lion's slightly open mouth. The image jogged an old ache.
He remembered the day he'd come up short when the system demanded a price and he'd fed it everything: body, gear, future all swallowed by that same carved jaw for a half-measure of "resurrection." The sting hadn't faded.
"Swallow this instead," he growled. "If the Dragon Vein can't unlock you, I change plans. But this should be enough to fill your greedy mouth."
He wrenched harder. The Dragon Vein's resistance thinned; time-energy slapped the lion icon like a tidal palm.
The hourglass blazed. The chains sang—
—and then: silence that thundered.
Sound collapsed to a metallic whine. The world pitched. His stomach tried to leave his body.
When the spin eased, Neji forced his focus inward. The "Gate of Time" subpage had transformed: a standing frame like a torii, the lion now serene, eyes closed, clutching a sunlit hourglass. Around it, space churned ink-black and amethyst, currents twisting in quiet, lethal elegance.
Neji probed the interface. The function surfaced cleanly. He smiled—
—and immediately gagged.
Rainbow sheen at the edge of his vision. Rainbow out.
He spent a minute on hands and knees doing his best impression of an emptying fountain.
Even Life Return couldn't smooth the shock of time compression ripping through his coils. When it passed, he sprawled on the sealing plinth, lungs sawing, sweat cooling fast in the desert air.
He stared up at the fractured ceiling and laughed once, breathless.
"Pulled too hard," he croaked. "Serves me right."
But the Gate was open.
And that changed everything.
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~Support with 200 PowerStones = 1 Bonus Chapter
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