At the same time, Jiraiya also turned his steps toward Konoha. By now, he had already concluded that Naruto Uzumaki was the Child of Prophecy—the one destined to bring massive change to the shinobi world.
"Looks like future me failed to guide Naruto onto the right path. But this time? I won't make that mistake again, hahaha..."
In Konoha's Ninja Academy, the suffocating silence that followed the sky curtain's disappearance lasted less than three seconds.
"Naruto Uzumaki!!!"
The roar exploded with such fury and grief that it seemed to shake the whole classroom. Sasuke Uchiha's black eyes shrank violently. Then, like a maddened cheetah finally loosed from its chain, he threw himself at Naruto, who was still standing there bewildered, wronged, and completely unprepared.
Caught off guard, Naruto took a heavy punch straight to the face and crashed to the floor.
"You actually dared... you actually dared to transplant the Sharingan!!"
Sasuke straddled him and started swinging without restraint. His bloodshot eyes burned with madness as his fists came down one after another like rain. His voice had gone raw when he roared, "I'll kill you! The honor of the Uchiha is not something you get to desecrate!"
The pain of the clan massacre was still fresh, still bleeding under his skin. To Sasuke, the Sharingan was not merely power. It was pride, grief, inheritance, a curse, a taboo—the final symbol his clan had left behind.
And in that future, Naruto had actually plucked a Sharingan from a dead arm and used an Uchiha forbidden technique with his own hands. Compared to that, even the image of Naruto destroying the world felt less immediate, less unbearable, than this defilement of the Uchiha name.
"Ow! Damn it! That hurts, bastard Sasuke!"
Naruto cried out in pain and instantly flared up in anger. He raised both arms to shield his face while struggling beneath Sasuke's attacks, shouting back, "That wasn't me! It has nothing to do with me! That was that bastard in the future, not me! Not me!!"
He felt so wronged he could almost choke on it. He had done nothing—nothing at all. Yet ever since the sky appeared, everyone had been staring at him like he was already a criminal, already a monster, already the one who would bring ruin to everything.
And now Sasuke was beating him like a man punishing a sin that had not yet happened.
But Sasuke, blinded by hatred and clan pride, couldn't hear a single word. Right now, he did not want explanations. He only wanted somewhere to vent the grief, rage, helplessness, and humiliation tearing through his chest.
"Stop! Sasuke! Stop right now!"
Only then did Iruka wrench himself free of his own shock. He lunged forward and grabbed Sasuke from behind, using all his strength to drag the enraged boy off Naruto before things got worse.
Naruto scrambled back to his feet, one hand pressed to his split lip. His face was already bruising, and his blue eyes blazed with pain, fury, humiliation, and confusion. Across from him, Sasuke was pinned in Iruka's grip, chest heaving violently, but the hatred in his stare was still sharp enough to draw blood.
Even restrained, Sasuke kept glaring at Naruto as though he wanted to carve him apart with his eyes alone. He drew in one ragged breath, then growled slowly and clearly, "Naruto Uzumaki... just wait."
This was far from over.
The rest of the students, who had just watched that explosion of violence at arm's length, sat in stunned silence. But when they looked at Naruto again, there was even more fear in their eyes than before—and an even wider distance.
***
Outside the Akatsuki's base, the gathered rogue ninjas turned, almost without discussing it, and focused their gazes on Uchiha Itachi. The looks in their eyes were layered and ugly—greed, curiosity, calculation, fear, and beneath all of it, a restless eagerness.
Orochimaru was the first to break the silence. His golden vertical pupils gleamed with naked fascination, and his long tongue slowly swept across his lips as a low, chilling laugh escaped him.
"I never imagined," he said softly, "that the Uchiha would hide such a marvelous forbidden art. Izanagi... to turn reality into a dream, to overturn life and death itself... it is practically a second life."
Those words sent a fresh wave of ripples through the rest of Akatsuki. Kakuzu's green eyes flickered as if he were already calculating how much such a secret might be worth—or how many extra lives it could buy him if he claimed it for himself.
Inside Hiruko, Sasori let out a hoarse, unreadable sound. Even he, an artist who believed beauty lay in eternity, could not ignore a technique that could rewrite death.
Zetsu swayed slightly, his black-and-white face looking stranger than ever. These were all men who stood near the peak of the ninja world, each with his own store of forbidden knowledge. Yet none of them had ever heard of a life-saving technique like Izanagi before the sky exposed it to the world.
If even Orochimaru—obsessed with collecting every jutsu under heaven—hadn't known it, then that alone was enough to prove how deeply buried and how precious the technique truly was.
Itachi remained expressionless, as though he felt none of those burning stares. But beneath the Akatsuki robe, every muscle in his body had already tensed. His Mangekyo Sharingan was gathering power in silence, ready to erupt at a moment's notice.
Alarm bells were ringing in his mind. The exposure of Izanagi had pushed him into a far more dangerous position than before. He understood the rule better than anyone: when a man carries something others desperately want, the mere act of possessing it becomes a crime.
Fortunately, Pain still stood before the others like a god-carved statue. The pressure flowing from his Rinnegan was enough, for now, to suppress the more immediate and dangerous impulses creeping through the group. Before the leader spoke, none of them dared act openly against an official member of the organization.
Orochimaru, however, clearly had no intention of dropping the matter. He licked his lips again and fixed Itachi with a feverish stare.
"Itachi-kun," he said, voice smooth as venom, "it would be such a waste for a splendid technique like that to remain in only one pair of hands. Perhaps you would be willing to exchange it? I have no shortage of forbidden arts in my collection. Or... name anything else you desire. We can negotiate."
Itachi gave him no answer.
Instead, he raised his head in one abrupt, deliberate motion. Crimson Mangekyo met golden slit pupils. In that instant, a killing intent so cold and sharp it felt almost physical pressed down on Orochimaru like a blade at his throat.
It was a warning. A clear one.
But to Orochimaru, a man whose desire for immortality and the Sharingan bordered on madness, it was less a deterrent than an invitation. The warning only made the greed in his eyes flare brighter.
"Heh..." Orochimaru's laugh came out even softer than before. He stared at Itachi's dangerous, beautiful eyes with the adoration of a collector who had finally found a treasure worth risking everything for. "They truly are... beautiful eyes."
There was admiration in those words, but more than that, there was possession. Hunger. The kind of gaze that looked at power not as something to respect, but as something destined to be stolen.
A chill ran through Itachi's heart. He understood that from this moment onward, his position inside Akatsuki had grown even more precarious.
But he did not care.
The disappearance of the sky curtain had not brought peace. If anything, it had opened the door to an age of even uglier conflict.
***
Back in Konoha, the greatest village in the shinobi world was still reeling from the massacre of the Uchiha clan, and yet it had already been struck by a second, even harsher wave of pressure from every direction.
On the Hokage's desk, the mountains of paperwork were no longer mission reports or internal records. They were letters—interrogation letters, censure letters, demands—sent from the other four great villages and stacked one atop another until the desk itself seemed buried.
Some came from Kage. Others came from daimyō, ministers, and nobles of the Land of Fire, each one expressing "grave concern" in language that grew sharper by the page. But every single document pointed toward the same name in the end.
Naruto Uzumaki.
"Naruto Uzumaki must be dealt with immediately, or at the very least placed under the joint supervision of the Five Great Villages!"
That was the core demand repeated again and again, in different wording but with the same intent. The pressure from outside was tightening like a noose. Konoha had barely survived one scandal, and now it was being forced to answer for a future catastrophe that had not yet happened.
Inside the Hokage's office, the air itself felt heavy.
Hiruzen Sarutobi sat behind the desk with a face carved from exhaustion. The lines in his expression had deepened. He had not yet found a way to put out the fire from the Uchiha massacre, and now the entire ninja world was demanding that he explain Naruto Uzumaki, explain Danzo, explain the Sharingan, explain the future war, explain everything.
Outside pressure. Internal instability. Fractures between clans. Rising panic among the villagers. And at the center of it all, a single child no older than the students still sitting in the academy classroom.
A child who, according to the sky, would one day become the destroyer of worlds.
The burden of that image now pressed down on Konoha like a mountain.
And everyone knew it: once blame began to settle, it would not stop at Naruto alone.