But Sasuke had no close friends now.
And even if he did, he would never walk down such an evil road.
I will never become that kind of person, he thought coldly.
The second revelation from the diary was even more important to him: somewhere out there, another person with Uchiha blood still existed. Even if that person no longer carried the Uchiha surname, the bloodline itself had not vanished.
That meant that even if one day he died, and even if Itachi died too, the Uchiha clan would not truly disappear from the ninja world.
That possibility mattered to him more than almost anything else.
At the same time, Sasuke had, for the first time, truly seen what the strongest shinobi standing at the pinnacle of the ninja world looked like.
The sight left him feeling that all his years in the Ninja Academy had been nothing but wasted time.
Even if he stayed in that academy for another hundred years, he would never attain Kage-level combat power there. The thought only made him more impatient for graduation to arrive.
If Itachi Uchiha could do it, then so could I.
***
Kitahara Kaede, meanwhile, had no idea that his diary had kept both Kakashi Hatake and Uchiha Sasuke awake all night, forcing them to wrestle with the mountain of information hidden between its lines.
He slept soundly until dawn.
The next day, he handed in the mission report he had written overnight.
No new assignment came afterward.
That was only normal. This was not wartime, and missions were not endless. Even in Konoha, there were not enough tasks to keep every shinobi busy every single day.
Especially not a cannon-fodder squad like Team Kitahara Kaede, whose members all seemed ordinary on the surface. A team like that would never become the focus of the higher-ups' attention.
And honestly, Kitahara Kaede was more than happy with that.
It gave him time.
Time to sharpen himself.
The Sharingan in particular was now an entirely new field before him, one he had never touched before. Every little detail in its application had to be explored from scratch.
What left him puzzled, though, was something else entirely.
Lately, he kept running into Uchiha Sasuke.
Sometimes once.
Sometimes twice.
Sometimes even three times in a single day.
Konoha might be called a village, but in reality it was already closer to a small town, and in the future it would grow even more urbanized. Even so, meeting the same person again and again in a place of that size was still strange.
Especially for someone like Kitahara Kaede, who had been a shinobi for years and still possessed at least a basic level of vigilance.
And it wasn't just Sasuke.
He had also crossed paths with Hatake Kakashi several times recently—a man he used to see maybe once or twice a year at most.
That made the whole thing feel even stranger.
Still, there was no denying that both of them were core figures of this world.
Especially Uchiha Sasuke.
Whether one looked at it from the perspective of the protagonist's storyline or from Konoha's political angle, Sasuke was always someone standing in the center of attention.
At present, the attention the higher-ups placed on Sasuke might not exceed what they placed on Naruto Uzumaki, the Nine-Tails jinchūriki. But because Sasuke was the last descendant of the Uchiha clan—and because of Itachi Uchiha—he was still under extremely close scrutiny.
More than once, Kitahara Kaede had vaguely sensed presences tailing Sasuke from outside his line of sight.
ANBU, most likely.
Or perhaps Root.
That was his guess.
And because of that, Kitahara Kaede had no interest whatsoever in standing out before he had enough strength to flip the table over himself.
So lately, he had been keeping an especially low profile.
What confused him more than anything was Sasuke's attitude.
Every now and then, Sasuke would look at him with a strange sort of goodwill.
Kitahara Kaede could not make sense of that at all.
Wasn't Sasuke supposed to be drowning in hatred at this stage of his life?
So where exactly was this odd friendliness coming from?
Still, after resting for several days, Kitahara Kaede eventually returned to work.
The missions were still basic things—catching cats, helping old people, dealing with nuisances, the usual clutter of peace-time shinobi life—but he did not find them boring in the slightest.
Because his second lottery draw was coming soon.
The authentic Uchiha bloodline he had won last time had boosted his power to an absurd degree.
So no matter how tedious the errands looked on the surface, he could not bring himself to mind them much.
That evening, after finishing the mission and wrapping up dinner at home, Kitahara Kaede washed up and returned to his desk.
Then he opened the diary again.
I've been running into Sasuke a lot lately. Better keep my distance. After all, Sasuke is one of the key figures being watched by Konoha's higher-ups right now. As a descendant of the Uchiha clan, he's always at the center of attention—second only to Naruto Uzumaki.
At almost the exact same moment, both Sasuke Uchiha and Kakashi Hatake sensed the diary updating.
Sasuke?
Sasuke stared at the page in speechless disbelief, black lines practically forming across his forehead.
He had already deeply experienced Kitahara Kaede's twisted sense of humor. After all, this was the same person who called Kakashi "Hatake 50/50." Compared to that, a nickname like "Sasuke" was almost mild.
Even so, judging from Kitahara Kaede's tone, it was clearly not meant kindly.
Sasuke was not, however, surprised by the diary's statement that he was being watched by Konoha's upper ranks.
That was only natural.
He was the last survivor of the Uchiha clan.
If Konoha's leadership were not complete fools, then of course they would be watching the final descendant of what had once been the strongest clan in the village.
In Sasuke's own mind, the Uchiha had always been the strongest.
He had never even heard much about the Senju clan, the old rivals who had once defeated the Uchiha.
That, too, made sense.
By the time Sasuke was born, the Senju had already faded from view. And when the Uchiha clan was exterminated, he had still been very young. Even if there had once been records inside the clan regarding their greatest rivals, he had never had the chance to properly inherit that knowledge.
Kakashi Hatake, meanwhile, saw the line and immediately made another mental note.
Be wary, he wrote inwardly.
Kitahara Kaede carries an ingrained wariness toward Konoha's leadership.
At first glance, it might not be obvious. But on key issues, it was clear enough: Kitahara Kaede deeply distrusted the village's higher-ups.
Whenever there was information that might expose the source of his mysteries, he consistently chose not to reveal it to them.
That kind of concealment was not the same as the ordinary secrecy every shinobi carried.
Every ninja had private matters. Even Kakashi himself had countless things he had never reported. But Kitahara Kaede's caution was different.
This was self-protection.
A strong, instinctive need to keep certain truths hidden at all costs.
That was why even something as simple as being noticed beside Uchiha Sasuke was unacceptable to him.
He had too many secrets.
Far too many things he could not afford to let anyone see.
Was that because of the diary?
Or because Uchiha blood flowed inside him?
Kakashi could not be certain.
But he knew better than most that Kitahara Kaede's vigilance was not baseless paranoia.
Kakashi had seen the village's darkness with his own eyes. He had served not only in the ANBU, but even in Root—the shadow beneath the shadows.
Then another paragraph from the diary appeared.
Looking ahead, a new wave of Ninja Academy graduates will arrive soon. The legendary Konoha Twelve will all graduate together. Of course, a bunch of cannon-fodder shinobi like me will graduate too. I just wonder how many of them will still be alive by the time the Fourth Great Ninja War begins.
The moment that line appeared, both Kakashi and Sasuke froze.
The Fourth Great Ninja War?
The words struck like thunder.
A new war?
Not just a conflict.
Not just a village incident.
A world war.
And not the first.
Not the second.
Not even the third.
The fourth.
For a heartbeat, neither of them could fully process it.
The name alone was enough to make one's scalp prickle.
Kakashi's expression darkened at once.
He had lived through the Third Great Ninja War. He knew better than almost anyone what those words meant.
The death.
The chaos.
The endless missions.
Children becoming killers before they had even grown up.
Shinobi villages turning entire countries into graveyards.
And now Kitahara Kaede was casually referring to a Fourth Great Ninja War as though it were a certainty waiting in the future.
If that was true, then the situation was far more terrifying than he had imagined.
Sasuke, on the other hand, had never experienced war directly.
But even he could feel the weight of those words.
The entire ninja world… at war?
What kind of enemy could possibly drag all the great villages into something like that?
And more importantly—
Would he still be alive by then?
Kitahara Kaede's tone had been joking, but the meaning underneath it was ice-cold.
For cannon-fodder shinobi, living long enough to even see such a war was not necessarily a blessing.
Against a battlefield where gods clashed and "Gundams" flew wildly everywhere, surviving long enough to reach that era might not be luck at all.
It might just as easily be misfortune.