At that moment, in Kiyohara's tent, the silence finally felt real.
"Now I can relax a little."
He let out a long breath and leaned back, the tightness in his chest easing for the first time in days. Ever since they reached Kannabi Bridge, his nerves had been stretched taut, humming like a wire on the verge of snapping. The rogue-nin Kiyohara could warn him if enemies were nearby, but that was all. Hidden traps, buried explosive tags, those silent little death sentences lying in wait beneath dirt and grass—those were another matter entirely.
Once someone stepped on one, not even the Three Legendary Sannin could save them.
Kiyohara had never once doubted that part of his future self's story. If anything, it sounded painfully believable. Tsunade's younger brother, Nawaki, had died the same way—one second alive, the next blown apart by an explosive tag so thoroughly that not even a proper corpse remained behind. In the ninja world, that kind of death wasn't rare. It was ordinary.
Which was exactly what made it terrifying.
"Orochimaru is in charge of this base."
The spirit of the rogue-nin Kiyohara drifted out of the urn in his mind, his tone carrying a strange sort of nostalgia. No matter how things had ended, Orochimaru had still been his superior for decades. That kind of association didn't disappear just because someone died.
Kiyohara looked at him thoughtfully.
"By the way, didn't Orochimaru give you a cursed seal? I remember even Mizuki had one."
Most of Orochimaru's followers shared one very recognizable trait. They bore cursed seals like branded marks of ownership. It was practically a signature at this point. If anyone in the ninja world stood at the forefront of cursed seal research, it was Orochimaru.
"Yes," the rogue-nin Kiyohara said. "But do you think your current body could withstand it?"
He gave Kiyohara a sidelong glance—not mocking, just practical. When he possessed this body, he could feel its limits clearly. The ceiling was there. Solid. Unforgiving.
That was the cruel truth of the ninja world. Plenty of techniques didn't fail because no one had imagined them. They failed because the body using them simply wasn't good enough.
Take the Rasengan.
Its principle wasn't difficult to describe. Condense chakra in the palm. Spin it in multiple directions at once. Compress it further and further until it became a sphere of terrifying rotational density. Was Minato Namikaze really the first person in a thousand years to imagine something like that?
Of course not.
The idea was one thing. Being able to do it was another.
What truly limited a ninja was never imagination. It was talent. Physical talent. If your body couldn't support a technique, then no matter how brilliant your theory was, it remained theory.
Kiyohara tapped the scroll beside him with one finger.
"Then what cursed seal do you know?"
"The Earth Seal," the rogue-nin Kiyohara replied. "But it requires Jugo's cells as a medium."
Kiyohara nodded slowly. That made sense. Orochimaru's cursed seal system was all built on the same foundation: cells taken from Jugo, whose body could naturally absorb senjutsu chakra. The cursed seal wasn't magic. It was a violent shortcut, one built on someone else's monstrous biology.
"That's still useful."
Even if he couldn't use it now, it was knowledge. And knowledge was never wasted.
Under the rogue-nin Kiyohara's dictation, he copied everything down onto a fresh scroll with careful strokes. Orochimaru probably hadn't completed the cursed seal system yet. Before defecting, he had only managed to produce the early version he branded onto Mitarashi Anko, a flawed prototype that couldn't even enter the second state.
Still, flawed or not, it was progress.
Just as Kiyohara finished rolling the scroll shut, a knock sounded against the fabric of the tent.
Thump. Thump.
"Come in."
The flap lifted, revealing a familiar face half-covered by a black mask.
It was Kakashi.
"It's this late. What is it, Kakashi?"
At some point, Kakashi had already pulled his forehead protector down to cover the Sharingan in his left eye. If not for his smaller frame, he would already look alarmingly close to the future Copy Ninja.
Kakashi stood there for a second before speaking.
"I… wanted to talk to you about Lightning Release."
His voice was hoarse, the kind of roughness that came from exhaustion rather than injury. Or maybe not just exhaustion. Maybe grief. Maybe guilt. Maybe the fact that he had no one else he could really say these things to.
Among everyone in their unit, only Kiyohara had actually shown any aptitude in Lightning Release.
Minato used the Flying Thunder God Technique. Rin was a medical ninja. Kurenai specialized in genjutsu. Genma favored senbon. Only Kiyohara had clearly displayed both Wind Release and Lightning Release. So when Kakashi needed someone who would understand—even a little—he ended up here.
Kiyohara instinctively glanced at the alarm clock hanging inside the tent.
Ten at night.
That was a very delicate hour.
For some people, it was the perfect time to show off. For others, the perfect time to find a girl and whisper sweet nonsense about the future. What it absolutely should not have been was the hour when a melancholy boy showed up to discuss Lightning Release ninjutsu.
If Rin had come at this hour, Kiyohara would have welcomed her in without hesitation.
But it was Kakashi.
Did Konoha really have its own brand of doppelganger literature?
Kiyohara reflexively glanced over his shoulder. The rogue-nin Kiyohara floating in the air wore an expression that was neither quite serious nor quite relaxed. It was exactly the kind of face someone made when they desperately wanted to laugh and were trying not to.
"Is it too late?" Kakashi asked after a pause, as if only just realizing the time.
He had probably spent so long lost in his own thoughts that the hour had stopped mattering.
"Then I'll come back tomorrow."
He turned to leave.
"No need," Kiyohara said, waving him off. "Sit down. We'll talk now."
Of course Kakashi was normal. Kiyohara knew that. His mind was just making entirely unnecessary connections because it enjoyed making his life harder.
Kakashi sat.
For a while, what followed wasn't really a discussion at all. It was more like Kakashi emptying everything in his head onto the floor between them.
"I knew Chidori had flaws," he said. "But now that I have Obito's Sharingan, those weaknesses are much smaller."
He spoke in fragments at first, then in longer and longer stretches, explaining how the technique worked, what it demanded, where it broke down, what changed now that his eye could track speeds his body alone couldn't handle. Kiyohara mostly listened, nodding from time to time, only asking questions when he saw a point worth tugging.
Kakashi was better than him at Lightning Release. Much better.
But that wasn't really the important part.
The important part was that Kakashi needed someone to hear him. And while he talked, Kiyohara quietly pieced the information together. The more he listened, the clearer the full framework of Chidori became in his mind. Another little piece here, another there. Enough fragments, and eventually you could see the whole.
That was how he learned now.
Not by being a genius from the start, but by collecting every scrap he could get his hands on.
"So," Kakashi said at last, "you're interested in Lightning Release too?"
"Of course."
Kiyohara answered without hesitation.
A lot of traditional ninja liked to say that among the five basic nature transformations, Wind Release had the greatest offensive power. To Kiyohara, that idea carried a kind of naive charm.
Wind was sharp.
Lightning, on the other hand, reached further.
Electricity gave rise to magnetism. Magnetism gave rise to electricity. Follow that far enough, and you brushed against something deeper than elemental ninjutsu—something that touched the fundamental structure of reality itself. Among the four fundamental forces of the universe, electromagnetic force was one of them.
In theory, if someone could push Lightning Release far enough, maybe they could even create a railgun by violently manipulating magnetic fields.
In practice, Kiyohara couldn't do any of that.
Not now.
Probably not anytime soon.
But that didn't change the direction of his ambition. Lightning Release still had a dazzling future ahead of it.
Kakashi looked at him for a long moment, then gave a faint nod.
"Then we can talk more about it later."
He had clearly calmed down after unloading all of that. More than that, Kiyohara could tell Kakashi had also been organizing his own thoughts as he spoke. That was how geniuses worked sometimes—they didn't explain things because they needed to teach. They explained them because saying them out loud made the structure clearer even to themselves.
And Kiyohara's occasional questions had impressed him too.
Kakashi might have been the genius here, but he had noticed that the questions Kiyohara asked were always clever in exactly the right way.
"Thank you, Kiyohara."
He stood and headed for the tent flap.
Kiyohara watched him leave, then slowly rubbed his chin.
If he merged fully with the rogue-nin Kiyohara, his talent would improve. His base physical stats would improve too. If those base stats rose high enough…
Then maybe he wouldn't need the Sharingan to keep up with Chidori's speed after all.
Maybe one day, he'd be able to see it with his own eyes.