The Uchiha Izumi before him felt like a stranger to Sasuke.
She did not match the gentle older girl in his memories, nor did she match his image of the surviving leader of the Uchiha Clan.
Sasuke watched Izumi as she calmly recounted what the Uchiha Clan had been through over the years.
She told him how they had gone from arriving here with nothing to being able to scrape by now.
Listening to her, Sasuke vaguely began to associate Izumi with someone whose image had already grown hazy in his memories.
The two were nothing alike, no matter how he looked at them, yet for no reason he could explain, he thought of him—
His father.
He, too, had talked about the clan members like this, sometimes frowning, sometimes sighing, sometimes rambling.
His words had also been about the clan members' everyday lives, and back then, his mother would scold him: "Stop talking about these unhappy things at home."
But in Sasuke's memories, his father had rarely said these things to him. On the contrary, he had often avoided him.
Those words had almost always been directed at his older brother, Uchiha Itachi.
Sasuke had not understood back then, but now he understood perfectly. It was the same feeling that had driven his father to say those things to Itachi.
It was a vision called "hope."
"Sasuke, have you ever thought about what a clan is?"
After giving a rough account of the past few years, Izumi looked at the thoughtful Sasuke before her and asked softly.
But Sasuke did not know how to answer.
He felt he had no right to tell Izumi what a clan was.
"Although you just called me the clan head, and your father was once the head of the Uchiha Clan too, have