Chapter 488: Somewhat Overconfident
Ryo was a bit perplexed.
Itachi was a Sage Body type, meaning he could slowly nurture his eyes just like Ryo did. However, the speed was agonizingly slow; even after having the Mangekyou Sharingan for five years, he had only nurtured it halfway. It would take another four to five years to transform into the Eternal Mangekyou, and the Rinnegan was completely out of reach for the foreseeable future.
Sasuke's physical constitution was quite a bit inferior to Itachi's, so he couldn't actively nurture his eyes. The only perk he had was that using his Mangekyou wouldn't cause his eyesight to deteriorate. Yet, out of nowhere, his eyes were executing an automatic evolution...
"It makes zero sense. What on earth are Indra and Asura's chakra anyway?" Ryo pondered for a moment. "Sasuke, Naruto, get over here. The Great Ancestor is going to give you a comprehensive physical exam."
"Me?" Naruto looked entirely dazed. "My eyes are perfectly fine. Why on earth are you checking me?"
"Good brothers should share both blessings and hardships equally," Ryo chuckled.
"Tch, who is good brothers with him," Naruto muttered as he stepped forward, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Sasuke.
Sakura looked back and forth from behind them, feeling she couldn't just sit and wait for doom: "Master, how about I..."
"And Tsukika!"
"Go play on the side!" Ryo burst into laughter. Enveloping his hands in a soft white light, he pressed them down smoothly against the left and right sides of Naruto and Sasuke's chests.
"You're healthy to an absolute fault, nothing wrong at all." Ryo knit his brows slightly. The right hand resting on Sasuke's chest slid upward, hovering directly over his eyes. "There seems to be a highly specific force driving the metamorphosis of his eyes... Indra's chakra?"
Ryo hesitated for a fraction of a second, and his left hand began sliding around Naruto's body, actively searching for the exact hiding spot of Asura's chakra.
Naruto's face washed over with profound confusion. What on earth is the Great Ancestor doing? Hey! Hey! Stop sliding your hand further down!
Fortunately, Ryo applied his brakes just in time.
"Not in the upper torso..." Ryo felt a fraction annoyed. He really should have checked Naruto thoroughly during his younger years; now that the boy was older, it wasn't particularly convenient...
Referencing the original story timeline, and drawing from the historical cases of Hashirama and Madara, the residual chakra of Asura and Indra was strictly beneficial to these two kids, so he likely didn't need to stress over it.
Even if it were detrimental, Ryo honestly couldn't think of a way to cleanly extract it at the moment. Based on the operational parameters of Sasuke's eyes, these two streams of chakra had already bound themselves tightly to their respective vessels. Unless he violently gouged out Sasuke's eyes and entirely sealed the chakra lining the sockets...
"Tsk!" Ryo shook his head, instantly tossing that horrific concept out of his mind. "It's no issue. Sasuke, your eyes are simply on the absolute verge of evolving into the Eternal Mangekyou. You'll command the Perfect Susanoo and comfortably hang Naruto up to give him a thorough beating."
Naruto: "..."
My heart is so incredibly heavy. He had barely managed to comfortably adapt to the seven-tails state a few days ago, and before he even had a chance to test his limits in a sparring match, Sasuke was already about to turn exponentially stronger?
Sasuke maintained his cold, aloof expression, his composure entirely unswayed as he spoke flatly: "Thank you for your trouble, Great Ancestor."
Kushina couldn't quite bear to look at her son's face anymore: "Great-grandfather, Naruto should be more or less ready to attempt to completely conquer that little fox, right?"
Ryo gave a firm nod: "Very close. Given his vertical growth rate, another three to four months should comfortably do it!"
Delight instantly blanketed Naruto's face, while Sasuke given a subtle pause. Their eyes locked across the space, generating a torrent of blazing sparks...
Sakura lightly clenched her fists. I have to put in even greater effort. Chasing after them is so exhausting, these two absolute hackers...
The following morning.
The sky hung heavily overcast, and a fine drizzle pattered softly against the earth.
Inside the Konoha Cemetery, thousands of shinobi and civilians clad entirely in black apparel arrived to pay their respects to Hiruzen.
There were fewer people than yesterday, strictly because the physical space couldn't accommodate a larger crowd.
After personally carving Hiruzen's name onto the Konoha Memorial Stone, Ryo immediately slipped his presence inside his Eight Trigrams space to quietly observe the funeral procession. A portion of his consciousness was concurrently running a live broadcast of the funeral proceedings straight for Hiruzen inside the Spiritual Space...
"The rain is quite heavy. I recall it rained during Hashirama's funeral too, soaking my entire body. Tobirama, you were a fraction lacking; the Second Grandfather was too lazy to even participate in your funeral block, plus it didn't rain a single drop."
"Eh, I recognize that seventy-year-old young lady right there. She's the one who crafted custom apparel for your successive generations of Hokage, isn't she? Looking at her expression, she appears deeply heartbroken."
"Tsk, does Konohamaru secretly possess an exceptionally high-tier affinity for Water Style? Look at the sheer volume of tears flowing."
"Kurenai has officially participated in the funeral as part of your family relatives, Hiruzen. It seems her relationship with Asuma is basically set in stone. However, with your passing, their wedding will likely be delayed until next year or even the year after, talk about throwing a wrench into the schedule! Asuma's visual aesthetics look exceptionally old; over the next two years, he's probably going to look monumentally ancient, while Kurenai looks like she's ten years younger than him, tsk!"
"Obito is presenting flowers for you, Hiruzen, his face packed with absolute solemnity. But why on earth does looking at him make me want to burst into laughter?"
The collective gathering of ghosts inside the space: "..."
Chatting while watching the visual broadcast, as noon drew near, the commoners systematically filed past to present their flowers before gradually scattering away, officially bringing Hiruzen's funeral to a settled conclusion. A neat row of Chinese characters seamlessly flashed across Ryo's vision.
*Witnessed and moderately altered the Naruto world main plot: The Third Hokage's Funeral, obtained 10 (5) = 50 Witness Points.
Tsk! Hiruzen kicking the bucket once yields a dual harvest of Witness Points from the system, absolute massive profit! My repository now stands at 1050 points, a mere 450 points away from hitting the maxed-out account tier!
Ryo was exceptionally ecstatic, expending a fraction of his spiritual energy to give his Spiritual Space a premier interior upgrade. Factoring in Madara—who remained strictly partitioned away—the total count of ghosts populating the space had reached a solid twelve. He had to guarantee a significantly larger and more comfortable habitat for them... Ryo intended to operate as a premier landlord.
Expanding the specific zones that weren't blanketed by the white mist by well over double their previous volume, Ryo felt a slight trace of fatigue. Waving his arm to bid farewell to the cluster of ghosts, his consciousness cleanly decoupled from the space.
The Konoha Cemetery was fundamentally empty by now. Ryo cast a brief glance over Hiruzen's tomb block, before peering deeper to trace Hashirama and Tobirama's graves, shaking his head as he stepped away... Minato should be more or less finished preparing lunch by now, right?
With Hiruzen 'finally, entirely dead', Konoha Village smoothly reverted back to its peaceful baseline.
The next day, the sisters Hinata and Hanabi arrived precisely on schedule to seek Ryo's personal guidance, exactly as they had over the past two years.
"Neji lacked free time?"
"Mmm... Brother Neji has an active mission assignment." Two years down the line, Hinata's voice remained soft and delicate.
Ryo gave a firm nod: "Let's move, heading to Training Ground 7. Hanabi, how is your progress regarding the practice of your Shredded-Pants Rotation (Kaiten)?"
Hanabi's little face flushed a deep crimson, and she fiercely turned her head away with a huff. This little girl had maintained a highly competitive, stubborn streak since her childhood; catching sight of how phenomenally cool Neji's Rotation appeared, she had single-mindedly insisted on mastering it too.
While her innate talent was excellent, she was simply a fraction too young. Her understanding of the core mechanics of Rotation was perfectly flawless, but as she spun, she failed to retain absolute stability. She would wobble and stagger like an absolute drunkard, drifting across a dozen clumsy paces to execute a mobile-variant Rotation.
Ultimately, her backside would slam flat against the dirt, and the residual kinetic energy of the Rotation would cleanly splinter the ground—and entirely shred her pants... That hilarious, awkward little profile of hers had been lightheartedly teased by Ryo for over a solid year.
"I absolutely won't sit flat against the dirt anymore!"
"Managing to alter the Rotation straight into a mobile version, you can comfortably be considered to have stumbled into making a unique structural contribution to the Hyuga clan, hahahahaha—hiccup..."
Konoha Training Ground 7.
Having meticulously mapped out the daily cultivation tasks for the Hyuga sisters, Ryo fell into a brief, focused calculation: The logical next phase demands that I wait until Naruto initiates his cultivation of the Nine-Tails Chakra Mode to comfortably harvest points... That still leaves a gap of three to four months. Simply waiting around like this feels like a monumental waste of absolute time, doesn't it?
Scanning his attribute parameters, Ryo hesitated for a brief moment, before decisively dumping 1000 Witness Points straight into his Wind and Fire attributes!
The third Gate of Life (Seimon) and the fourth Gate of Pain (Shōmon) instantly tore open dedicated pocket spaces within his vessel. Up to this exact fraction of a second, barring the absolute eighth Gate of Death (Shimon), Ryo's preceding seven gates had systematically opened individual pocket spaces, and they seamlessly appeared to... interconnect as a single cohesive unit?!
An incredibly bizarre, anomalous physiological sensation rippled out from within, and Ryo suddenly parsed out that his physical body appeared to be experiencing a trace of expansion... a monumental structural expansion, expanding to a tier where his clothes felt a fraction too tiny...
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