"What is this?"
Hyuga Neji looked at the diary. Kaede Kitahara's diary?
He seemed to have some impression of that name. A member of his older cousin's squad, later promoted to team captain.
But the words written after it, Hyuga Neji Copy, made him fall completely silent.
He immediately opened the diary and started reading. Before long, his whole body went still.
"Konoha Crush Plan?"
Hyuga Neji was shocked. In the current Shinobi World, there were still people reckless enough to try launching a surprise attack on Konoha?
What appeared next was the video of Hatake Kakashi facing off against Orochimaru.
Hyuga Neji knew Hatake Kakashi. Konoha's Number One Technician. His teacher's close friend.
He was also faintly regarded as Konoha's strongest ninja aside from the Hokage. Neji had seen him plenty of times in daily life.
But when he saw Hatake Kakashi facing Orochimaru, barely daring to breathe, unable even to achieve mutual destruction, Neji's entire worldview shattered.
Because in his understanding, the strongest ninjas were only at the Elite Jonin level. The so-called Kage was nothing more than a position, a title.
Normally speaking, that understanding was not wrong.
But Kaede Kitahara gave a completely different answer. In Kaede Kitahara's description, Kage was not only a position. It was also a division of strength.
Aside from the Five Great Hidden Villages, it was not as if no other village leaders called themselves Kage. But as a measure of strength, very few people besides the leaders of the Five Great Hidden Villages could reach that level.
And Orochimaru belonged to that level.
One of the Legendary Sannin!
Hyuga Neji thought about it. He seemed to have heard of them before, but only from clan members mentioning them occasionally when he was still very young. After that, he had never heard much about them again.
At the time, he had thought the Legendary Sannin of Konoha were roughly the same kind of concept as Hatake Kakashi being called Konoha's Number One Technician. Only now did he realize the gap was actually that huge.
They were all ninjas with titles, yet the difference between Kage Level ninjas and non-Kage Level ninjas was that great.
This completely expanded the upper limit of his understanding. It let him know that above Elite Jonin, there was still the existence known as Kage Level.
Next came Return of the Morning Mist. Uchiha Itachi's Mangekyo Sharingan gave him an enormous shock.
All this time, the Uchiha Clan had been known as Konoha's number one noble clan, while the Hyuga Clan was only ranked second. On this matter, he had never accepted it. He did not believe the Sharingan was stronger than the Byakugan.
If the Byakugan seemed inferior, it was not so much that the Byakugan was inferior to the Sharingan. It was more that the people using the Byakugan were inferior to the people using the Sharingan.
He was confident that the Uchiha Clan's top student, one year younger than him, was definitely not his match.
Both came from prestigious dōjutsu clans. Both were first in their year. Their ages were close. He was confident he could firmly suppress Uchiha Sasuke.
Although they had never fought, he knew it in his heart.
He had also heard about the Uchiha Clan being wiped out. He simply had not expected the circumstances involved to be so absurd.
The strength displayed by Uchiha Itachi was truly terrifying.
He had to admit that, when it came to the Mangekyo Sharingan, their Byakugan truly did not possess abilities like that.
"Is the Byakugan really inferior to the Sharingan?" Hyuga Neji could not calm down. Especially when he saw that the future Uchiha Sasuke had actually broken through to the Kage Level mentioned in Kaede Kitahara's diary and had also awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan.
At the same time, Sasuke's battle with Shimura Danzo also shocked Hyuga Neji.
Clearly, that was something the current Hyuga Neji, and even the entire current Hyuga Clan, had no one capable of doing.
Because the Byakugan lacked a further evolved form, its potential was practically locked.
At the Elite Jonin level, the Byakugan's performance would also be dazzling. But once the level rose another step, everything became completely different.
In Kaede Kitahara's diary, Uzumaki Naruto and Uchiha Sasuke were even called saviors.
That was the ultimate affirmation of their future.
A whole series of things he had never thought of, never seen, and never realized were laid out in front of him all at once.
Even the killing intent of Zabuza, the Demon, who counted as relatively low-level among them, was not something the current him could match. The faint pride in his heart, the pride of being the Hyuga Clan's number one genius, was smashed to pieces.
Even if he was that so-called genius, so what? A so-called genius would not even get a single scene in Kaede Kitahara's eyes.
Who was not a genius? Who had not been young once?
"Am I really this useless…?"
Hyuga Neji wanted to say that he was only young. As long as he reached that age, he would naturally be able to stand shoulder to shoulder with these people. But he had no way to go against his conscience, especially not to deceive himself. That was even less his style.
At this moment, the feeling of being a caged bird grew even heavier. The seal on his forehead was a prison he could never break through in this life. No matter how he wanted to fly, he could not escape it.
After that, one astonishing clash after another opened his eyes. Especially when he saw the brilliant battle between the Third Hokage and Orochimaru in the Konoha Crush Plan that was about to happen.
In a certain sense, neither of them was in peak condition.
The Third Hokage was already old, while Orochimaru had also changed bodies and was not at his peak.
Even so, the battle of Hokage versus Hokage was something he had never seen in his life.
A battle at that level gave his young mind an enormous shock.
So this was what battle could be like. So this was what the world of the truly strong looked like.
His self-esteem as one of the best among his peers had already been broken by Hyuga Keiko. Now, it collapsed completely once again.
Especially when the Akatsuki Organization surfaced, it gave him an even greater shock. He had never imagined that one organization could gather so many experts.
Any one of them was Kage Level. They even dared to directly attack the Hidden Leaf Village and Sunagakure without the slightest fear. In his heart, both villages were massive, untouchable existences. Yet against attacks like that, they were simply no match. They were nearly beaten into total collapse.
In the end, Konoha was preserved, but the entire village was flattened. As for Sunagakure, although it had not been directly crushed, its Kazekage had been captured.
A Kage of a great nation could actually be captured?
Hyuga Neji's worldview collapsed along with it. So this was what the world of experts was like. So there were experts like this.
Compared with these top-level experts, their Hyuga Clan was far too mediocre. Even the current strongest member of the Hyuga Clan, his uncle Hyuga Hiashi, was not worth mentioning in front of these people.
"So that's how it is. Is our Byakugan really that pathetic?"
Hyuga Neji could not help saying.
And this was only the gap at the Kage Level. By the time Super Kage Level suddenly appeared, it had already reached a strength Hyuga Neji could not even imagine. He could sense the power of experts at that level. They could be called invincible.
When he saw the battle between the two brothers, Uchiha Itachi and Uchiha Sasuke, that brilliant fight was also something he could not have touched before. This was also where the limitations of their Gentle Fist lay. The Gentle Fist was very balanced. It could be said to have a method for dealing with all kinds of enemies.
But at the same time, the Gentle Fist had great limitations. It was very mediocre.
At its core, the Gentle Fist was a Taijutsu style with a very high floor but not much of a ceiling. Of course, that ceiling was only considered low compared to the top existences of the Shinobi World. For ordinary people, it was still an extremely impressive Taijutsu style.
And Hyuga Neji obviously would not consider himself an ordinary person. He had his pride. But the more that was true, the more painful it became.
Especially because Uchiha Sasuke, faintly treated as his benchmark and comparison target, would become so incredible in the future that he could almost suppress the entire Shinobi World by himself. That made Neji feel even worse.
His own failure was painful, of course. But the success of a rival was what truly made someone feel as if they would rather die.
But when he saw the latest update, his eyes immediately lit up.
"So the source of our Hyuga Clan is the Otsutsuki…"
Hyuga Neji murmured to himself.
Originally, he had not known what the Otsutsuki were. But who asked Kaede Kitahara to describe the Otsutsuki Clan in his diary as terrifying beings like living gods?
And among the clans derived from the Otsutsuki Clan, there were the Uchiha Clan and Hyuga Clan, which inherited the Sage's Eyes, and the Uzumaki Clan, Senju Clan, and Kaguya Clan, which inherited the Sage's Body. Which one of them was not a powerful clan famous throughout the Shinobi World?
Although Kaede Kitahara had said that the origins of all other dōjutsu Kekkei Genkai came from the Byakugan, making the Byakugan sound extremely impressive.
But if it was the origin of all dōjutsu, then why was the Byakugan's performance so much worse than the Sharingan, which was also a dōjutsu Kekkei Genkai?
To be precise, at the Three Tomoe stage, the Byakugan was not lacking. It could only be said that the two had developed in different directions. One held more advantage on the tactical level, while the other was extremely important on the strategic level.
This was also the fundamental reason why the Hyuga Clan had always refused to accept being beneath the Uchiha Clan.
They did not believe they were inferior to the Uchiha Clan. But when the Sharingan evolved into the Mangekyo Sharingan, the Byakugan was completely outclassed.
So far, only four pairs of Mangekyo Sharingan had appeared, or rather, four people had possessed them: Uchiha Itachi, Uchiha Sasuke, Uchiha Kenji, and Hatake Kakashi. In Hyuga Neji's eyes, the abilities of these four people's Mangekyo Sharingan were simply unbelievable.
There was no need to even mention Amaterasu, that unreasonable ability where anyone touched by it would be burned alive. There was also Tsukuyomi, that unreasonable Genjutsu. As long as someone met the user's gaze, they would be directly pulled in and tortured for three days and three nights.
Then there was Uchiha Kenji's ability to completely make his body intangible, which even involved Space-Time Ninjutsu. It was simply inconceivable.
The Mangekyo Sharingan in Hatake Kakashi's eye was just as outrageous. It could actually twist people and objects in the distance directly out of shape. How was anyone supposed to fight that?