Sigh, thank you all for your support.
I want to apologize to all of you. I'm sorry—I dragged this book out for far too long.
This book should have ended at the beginning of the year, and I should have started a new one afterward. By then, it was barely earning any royalties, but I fell into a vicious cycle.
The old book wasn't finished—there were regrets—I didn't want to start a new book—but I couldn't keep writing the old one.
Sigh!
Still, thank you all for your support.
Honestly, I'm not very satisfied with the ending.
According to the original outline, I never intended to follow the original plot, nor did I plan for him to marry Kushina. When I first conceived this book, Pakura was the only female lead, and that was also meant to lay the groundwork for the Akatsuki storyline.
Later, when I wrote the Fourth Hokage and his wife to death, there was too much backlash. The number of continuing readers plummeted, and everyone said I wanted to follow the original plot. That really panicked me, so last year I hurriedly changed the plot and revised the outline. At the time, I hadn't intended to follow the original plot.
In the end, the revisions turned into a complete mess.
At first, I hadn't planned to revive Hashirama Senju. I wanted to revive Uchiha Izuna; the Hashirama Senju plotline was only a discarded draft at the time.
Later, because the backlash over "Nine-Tailed Night" was too great, I pulled out that discarded draft and used it.
But that created another problem.
After Hashirama Senju was revived, unlike Uchiha Madara, he couldn't become a character who saved the day. Instead, he became superfluous, his only purpose being to bring Tsunade back to the village.
The original main