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Neji stayed sprawled on the sealing platform for a long while before dragging himself upright.
The dizziness still clung like sea-sickness, the kind that stole your balance and blurred even the concept of time itself.
"Ugh. Worse than any boat ride," he muttered, rinsing his mouth with a pull from a water flask.
The lingering haze ebbed. The Dragon Vein's chakra was enormous comparable to a Tailed Beast's, though stranger in flavor. Leaning back against his conjured island-cloud chair, he opened his system view.
The Gate of Time subpage had changed: the lion head now gripped not one, but three glowing hourglasses filled with golden sand. Its eyes remained hollow, unawakened. Neji was glad the last thing he wanted was his system sprouting a personality.
"Three hourglasses… three revivals," he reasoned. "And each can open the Gate once. But without an anchor, world travel is random. Dangerous."
Normal accumulation was laughable one grain of sand per day. Filling a single hourglass naturally? Centuries. He'd need concentrated sources of temporal energy like the Dragon Vein. Still, three charges were a win.
More surprises: the points system had been reactivated. Toss something into the lion's mouth, earn points. A hundred points could buy a grain of sand.
Testing a plain kunai earned him a flat zero. "Figures. Unless it's gold or better, trash doesn't count."
He remembered feeding a mountain of gold into the system once. Gold had been his lifeline then. Same with Devil Fruits especially the weak animal-types he'd hoarded.
He winced at the memory of the fruit he himself had gambled on: a useless oddball of a Paramecia. "What idiot eats a mystery fruit at level one? Oh right—me."
He buried the cringe and kept testing. A cloned Sharingan three tomoe lit the lion's eyes.
Points: 300.
"Didn't expect the Uchiha eyes to be priced so high."
A Byakugan clone scored the same: 300. Two-tomoe, 200. One-tomoe, 100. An unawakened dojutsu, barely 50. Rough market rates, apparently.
But the real shock came when he checked his linked Beasts. Across the ocean, both Matatabi and Isobu shivered violently as golden light brushed them.
Matatabi (Two-Tails): 60 million points.
Isobu (Three-Tails): 70 million points.
Neji's lips curled. "Now that's real currency. Tailed Beasts… worth more than Kingdoms."
Enough points to drown in time-sand. Enough to "spend" recklessly.
No. Dangerous thinking. He cut himself off immediately. "This isn't about dying. It's about being sealed. And if that happens, even resurrection won't save me."
That nightmare eternal darkness, sealed away like Kaguya wasn't worth any gamble.
Satisfied he understood his new arsenal, Neji rose, collected his cloud-seat, and stretched. The aftershocks had faded. But as he looked at the broken ruins around him, the realization struck: without the Dragon Vein, Rōran was finished.
His thought was punctuated by a quake.
The ground beneath him cracked. He focused below and saw clearly the hollow left by the drained Dragon Vein collapsing in on itself.
"Not later," he said grimly. "Now."
The tremors intensified. Fissures raced outward; buildings groaned and toppled. Sand avalanched down. Neji lifted a hand, diverting rubble aside with chakra as he took to the air.
Below, the desert opened like a throat. Rōran, the ancient city of towers, sank into a yawning chasm. Flowing dunes poured in to smother its last breath.
High above, Neji watched the city's final moment. A canyon was born; one day, even that would vanish under the tides of sand.
"Ended," he whispered, then turned away.
The desert swallowed history behind him.
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