The rest of the assessment passed without much surprise.
Hyuga Tetsuya stepped onto the stage and defeated his opponent with almost clinical ease, his Byakugan laying bare every movement before it could fully form. Watching him, Kiyohara could not help thinking there was a reason the Hyuga had the confidence to declare themselves Konoha's strongest clan after the Uchiha fell. Their upper limit might not be as outrageous, but their foundation was absurdly stable. With proper training, nearly every Hyuga could open the Byakugan.
The Uchiha were different. Their eyes were terrifying, yes, but awakening them came with a price written in blood. Lose a loved one. Lose a friend. Lose enough, and perhaps the Sharingan would answer. In that sense, the Uchiha's power always felt like a blade forged in grief.
And the Byakugan's path of evolution was even stranger.
The Sharingan had a ladder: one tomoe, two tomoe, three tomoe, Mangekyo, and beyond that, legends. The Byakugan seemed to skip all of that and leap from a practical bloodline limit straight toward something mythic enough to split the moon in half. No wonder Kiyohara found the whole thing unreasonable. The ninja world really was a world ruled by bloodlines. In the end, the so-called story of ninjas was just the descendants of aliens fighting over a family inheritance, while ordinary people like him risked their lives in the cracks.
Still, complaints were pointless.
If he could not beat the rules of the world, then he would find a way to exploit them.
Soon, the final match ended, and the examiner summoned all the successful candidates to the center of the arena. The genin who had passed lined up shoulder to shoulder, faces tight with anticipation. Some were trying to keep calm and failing. Some looked proud. A few looked as if they had already begun imagining how different life would become the moment they put on a chunin vest.
Kiyohara stood quietly among them.
The examiner began the usual speech about duty, responsibility, and the Will of Fire. Kiyohara listened with the proper expression and let half the words drift past him. In practical terms, becoming a chunin meant moving from low-level expendable labor to slightly more skilled expendable labor. It was still work. Dangerous work, underpaid work, and work done in service of a village that expected everything and explained very little.
Unless you entered real power—administration, intelligence, command, or some inner department—a chunin was still just a better-made cog in Konoha's war machine.
But it was a bigger cog.
And right now, that mattered.
After the speech, the examiner began calling names one by one. Each successful candidate stepped forward to receive the symbols of their new status: a green flak vest, a fresh forehead protector, and the formal paperwork confirming promotion. The vest carried a weight to it, not just in cloth and stitching, but in implication. It meant recognition. Better treatment. A higher mission bracket. More credibility. And, most importantly, access to a different future.
When Kiyohara's name was called, he walked forward at a measured pace.
Under the examiner's approving gaze, he extended both hands. The chunin vest was placed into them first, cool and solid, dyed a deep military green that looked even more dignified up close. Then came the new forehead protector. The metal plate caught the light, the Leaf symbol gleaming against polished steel. Last came the credentials, still warm enough that Kiyohara suspected the ink had only recently dried.
The efficiency made him want to laugh.
They must have prepared most of it in advance, leaving only the names to fill in at the last second. So this was how the village operated when it wanted to move quickly. Interesting. Very interesting.
From this moment on, he was officially a chunin of Konoha.
And at that exact moment, something changed.
Kiyohara's breath caught.
He turned, not with his body, but with his awareness, toward the presence that had been with him through life and death, battle and sleepless nights. The spirit of Rogue Ninja Kiyohara, who had floated beside him for so long, had begun to shine.
It was not an aggressive brilliance. The light was soft, clear, and warm, like sunlight falling through winter haze. It traced the lines of the rogue ninja's face, making that weathered expression look younger for a fleeting instant. The constant faint transparency that had clung to him disappeared. For one brief moment, he looked more real than ever.
Then Kiyohara saw it.
A smile.
Faint, tired, and utterly unguarded.
It was the smile of someone who had finally put down a burden he had carried for too long.
Kiyohara understood immediately.
A dying wish was, in essence, the knot that held a soul in place. The rogue ninja Kiyohara had lingered because he had left something undone. He had not become a legitimate chunin while he was alive. He had spent his later years as a missing-nin, surviving like a hunted dog, chased, used, discarded. That regret had rooted itself too deeply to let him vanish cleanly.
And now, through Kiyohara, that wish had finally been fulfilled.
The rogue ninja's lips moved. His voice, once rough and sardonic, seemed distant now, as if it were already being carried away by wind.
"My last wish… is fulfilled."
The light around him trembled softly.
"From here on… take care of yourself."
His form began to break apart, not violently, but naturally, like fine ash lifted by a breeze. Countless motes of pale light floated free from his outline, then drifted toward Kiyohara's body.
There was no resistance. No struggle. No sense of foreignness.
It was as if those fragments had always belonged there.
The light entered him in silence.
Kiyohara froze where he stood.
He had expected pain. Or at least impact. Something dramatic. Some explosion of chakra or tearing of muscle or violent distortion of consciousness. Instead, the change happened from the inside out, smooth and overwhelming in a way that made it impossible to resist.
The first thing to transform was his mind.
It felt as though cool spring water had been poured into a stagnant pond. Thoughts that had once felt slightly sluggish became quick and clean. His awareness sharpened. The scrape of sandals on the floor, the rustle of cloth in the stands, the low whispers of spectators dozens of meters away—everything arrived with startling clarity. Even the ambient flow of air across the arena felt easier to read.
His spiritual energy had risen.
Not by a little, either. It was a firm, unmistakable leap.
And because chakra was born from the union of physical energy and spiritual energy, the increase did not stop there. His body responded in kind. The chakra he could refine, hold, and circulate rose noticeably. It was not some mythical flood, but it was real—solid enough that Kiyohara could sense the difference immediately. The ceiling of what he could do in one fight had just been pushed upward.
Then came talent.
His affinity for Wind Release and Lightning Release deepened all at once. Ideas that had been murky yesterday felt almost obvious now. The rogue ninja's decades of familiarity with those chakra natures did not become perfect mastery in Kiyohara's hands, but they smoothed the path. Obstacles in his understanding became shallower. Principles clicked into place. His instincts for shaping chakra were better, cleaner, more precise.
If he relearned Lightning Release: Earth Walk now, he could do in far less time what had once required intense effort.
Fragments of memory followed.
Not enough to overwrite him. Not enough to confuse him about who he was. Just flashes.
Cold laboratory light glinting off rows of glass containers in one of Orochimaru's hidden bases.
The feeling of being pursued, hungry, sleepless, wounded, never fully safe.
A complicated knot of emotion whenever Konoha came into view—not simple hatred, not homesickness either, but something uglier and more human.
And over all of it, the shape of a life Kiyohara had never lived, but now understood in pieces.
That part relieved him.
He had worried that inheriting a future self might mean being buried under someone else's decades of experience until he no longer knew where one self ended and the other began. That would have been terrifying. A kind of slow possession more dangerous than any jutsu. But no. The inheritance was selective. Enough to empower him. Not enough to erase him.
He was still himself.
Only sharper.
Only stronger.
Through those broken memory fragments, he also grasped something else.
The worlds of those future selves were not simple continuations of his current timeline. They were possibility branches. Parallel developments. Paths grown from the same root, not steps on a single straight road. In one, he became a rogue ninja. In another, perhaps something else entirely. The "future" the Last Will connected to was not the inevitable. It was the possible.
Which meant one thing.
His guesses had been right.
The Last Will was anchored not to this body alone, not to one fixed history, but to the deeper existence of "Kiyohara" as a branching point.
That realization sent a quiet chill through him.
If that was true, then the possibilities were far broader than he had dared to assume.
At the same time, that also meant the dangers were endless.
After a long moment, Kiyohara exhaled and opened his eyes.
The examiner was already calling the next name. No one around him seemed to have noticed anything more than a brief pause. To everyone else, he had simply stood there for a second too long after receiving his promotion.
Only Kiyohara knew how much had changed.
A legitimate chunin.
The rogue ninja's final wish had been fulfilled.
And now, at last, everything that man had carried was part of him.
He stepped down from the platform and made his way toward the spectator stands. Kurenai Yuhi was already waiting there, a bag of snacks in her arms. The moment she saw him, her eyes brightened.
"Kiyohara!"
She hurried over, clearly still excited from his earlier victory.
"You were incredible. I really thought you were going to lose when he activated the Sharingan."
"Just barely," Kiyohara said with a faint smile.
He accepted the skewers and snacks she offered, then bit into a tricolor dango. The sweet, chewy taste spread across his tongue and somehow made the exhaustion in his limbs more bearable.
"What was that move you used at the end?" Kurenai asked. "You didn't use anything like that in the Land of Grass."
Kiyohara chewed, swallowed, and answered simply.
"I worked it out myself. It's called Lightning Release: Shuriken Lightning Guiding Technique. I combined a little Lightning Release with shuriken manipulation. Kakashi gave me a few useful ideas earlier, so I pushed it a bit further."
"Kakashi, huh…"
Kurenai nodded, though from her expression, she only half understood the technical side of it. Still, one thing was obvious even to her: Kiyohara had become stronger.
And in times like these, strength was survival.
"That's still amazing," she said. "Anyway, stronger is better."
Kiyohara gave a quiet hum of agreement and turned his gaze back toward the arena below.
The one-tomoe Sharingan was already troublesome. Two tomoe would be worse. Three tomoe worse still. And beyond those waited monsters that could twist reality itself. Today's victory had been satisfying, but it had not made him arrogant. If anything, it only reminded him how far he still had to go.
He touched the edge of his new chunin vest.
The cloth felt real beneath his fingers.
In his mind, the urn that had once contained Rogue Ninja Kiyohara was gone.
Nothing remained of it now.
No voice floated beside him. No phantom expression. No dry commentary from behind his shoulder.
For the first time since all of this had begun, he was truly alone again.
And yet he was not alone at all.
The rogue ninja's talent lived in him now. His chakra, his instincts, the path he had walked and paid for with blood—all of it had become Kiyohara's foundation.
Kiyohara lowered his eyes and thought silently:
I hope the next one gives me more chakra.
Because even after all this, he still felt one truth more sharply than ever.
He was not strong enough.
Not yet.