"Did I... fall asleep?"
Slowly opening his eyes, Chiba gradually sat up from the bedside. He glanced at the hazy sky outside, listened to the patter of rain by his ears, and murmured groggily.
After sitting down last night, he had thought about many things—so many things. He did not even know when he had fallen asleep.
"In the end, I still couldn't figure it out."
After that glance, his gaze shifted away from the window and fell on the messy, unorganized desk and the patch of floor beside it.
Then, his gaze landed on the clock.
Chiba had slept for a long time. The clock already read 9:20. According to their arrangement, he should have met with Kakashi by now to discuss the formation of the Ninja Engineering Corps and see how successful Kakashi had been at recruiting people.
And he had gotten nowhere with his final thoughts from last night. A deadlock was still a deadlock, an unsolvable problem was still unsolvable. The Caged Bird Seal was always an obstacle he could not get around.
There was truly no solution to this. There were so many Curse Mark Jutsu Formulas he had never seen before, perhaps even ones that could no longer be found anywhere in the ninja world. Even after racking his brains and searching relentlessly through his memories of the original work, he could not find a single clue.
The Caged Bird Seal, this Curse Mark Jutsu, had barely been explored in the original work. There was no breakthrough to be found in this Naruto World either. It was a dead end beyond dead ends. I'll keep looking and keep thinking. If there really is no way... then I'll have no choice but to kill Hyuga Hiashi's entire family.
Slowly rising to his feet and walking