All right, I knew the plot had been moving far too quickly lately.
Basically, the Konoha Crush Plan arc didn't shift in a good direction. Before that, the story had always been written around the idea of "the protagonist showing off with the cheat of reincarnation," and I actually thought that was pretty good.
But everyone was looking forward to change more, and I felt it was impossible for him to show off from beginning to end. Besides, the original later developments were also heading toward change, so after the second round of the Chunin Ninja Exams, I began trying to move toward a reform-focused plot.
As a result, by the time I was writing the Konoha Crush Plan, I ran into many things in real life. On top of being in poor condition at the time and being rather stubborn myself, I failed to make the transition completely.
That indirectly affected what came afterward. My own state worsened, and I lost my enthusiasm, so I could only keep pushing the plot forward, over and over again.
Still, overall, the final word count was roughly what I had expected, though many plotlines were left unwritten, such as Boruto, the Dragon Vein, the Pure Land, the Sage of Six Paths, and so on.
Many characters also never appeared in the end. In fact, I had originally planned to write a separate Dragon Vein time-travel arc, where people from a parallel world would come here. It would have been set in Year 68, with Naruto discovering that everything he had done had not been in vain and finally breaking the cycle. But now I truly felt that I was in a bad state, so I did not continue writing it.
I had previously said that I would explain in greater detail what