The last frame of his memories remained fixed on the moment he and Second Pillar had joined forces, using that ridiculously long-named Rasengan to completely devour Otsutsuki Urashiki before leaving the battlefield.
Naruto's vision gradually cleared, and the first thing he saw was an unfamiliar ceiling.
Why... was he lying in bed?
He felt bewildered. Had the battle ended? Had he collapsed from exhaustion? That shouldn't have been possible.
Then, an extremely strange and impossible-to-ignore sensation came from his right eye.
It was not pain, but rather the uncomfortable feeling of an unfamiliar source of energy having been stuffed there, continuously consuming a considerable amount of Chakra beyond his control.
It was not harming him for the moment, yet it kept drawing on his energy, causing physical discomfort.
Naruto frowned. The moment he thought about "shutting off" that pointless drain—
The constant sensation of Chakra being siphoned away actually stopped abruptly! The unfamiliar energy source's "idling" came to a halt.
Inside the hospital room, everyone, who had fallen into dead silence because of the strange change in Naruto's right eye, stared at his mismatched pupils with confusion and vigilance. His left eye was blue, while his right was black and gold—especially that eye with its inhuman golden gleam against a pitch-black background.
Even the well-traveled Jiraiya, who had roamed the Ninja World for years, had never seen such peculiar eyes.
Yet just as they were wracked with uncertainty, something even more unexpected happened.
The strange colors in Naruto's newly opened right eye, still hazy with confusion, rapidly faded away! It returned to a normal eye.
Naruto himself sensed the change in his eye, but he was even more puzzled by why everyone was staring at him with such shocked and complicated expressions.
"...Are you... Naruto?"
A woman's voice, carrying hesitation,