Chapter 319 - 319: Ryusei Checks On The Only Honest Man

A week later, Konoha's hospital was still overflowing with patients and reports.

The top floor, reserved for the highest-priority cases, stayed quiet despite the commotion below.

In the last room and the most spacious room, Duy lay bedridden, wrapped in thick bandages, barely able to move.

A fourteen-year-old Guy sat behind the bed, knees pulled up, trying his best to stop his leg from shaking.

He kept glancing at his father, then at the door, then at nothing.

The air shifted.

Ryusei stepped into the room as if carried by a passing breeze.

Silent.

Effortless.

His chakra, vast enough to drown a nation, felt like a single drop of water in the room, contained completely, almost gentle.

The contrast made him look more like a transcendent spirit than a shinobi.

Guy stiffened.

Duy opened one weak eye.

Ryusei's appearance had changed.

His hair, once dark, had turned a pale white-gray.

It was similar, but it wasn't the same as Madara's or Obito's transformations, which came from sealing the Ten Tails abruptly into their bodies.

Ryusei's was different.

Calmer.

Deeper.

More complete.

He had spent the past week completely letting his unique physiology fuse with the Ten Tails gradually, not forcefully.

The Ten Tails inside Madara, whom he 'swallowed', had been broken down and absorbed piece by piece, adapted, refined, and converted by Ryusei's own slug-based body and the yin–yang ritual he perfected.

It took time.

But the result far surpassed what a normal jinchuriki would achieve.

Ryusei no longer held the Ten Tails as something separate inside him.

He was now the Ten-Tails.

Fused it into him.

A unified organism.

A stable entity.

A higher existence.

He stepped forward, hands in his pockets.

"Duy," he said quietly.

The bedridden man blinked slowly, a faint smile forming despite the pain.

"You came…" he whispered.

Ryusei nodded.

Initially, Might Duy had been trapped in the center of Madara's fairly powered Chibaku Tensei for far too long. The pressure inside that sphere was brutal.

By the time the boulder finally fell apart and Madara left, Duy's body was barely holding together.

He survived only because he was visible enough so that the first medics on the scene kept him alive long enough for when Ryusei's group returned to the village victorious.

Once they did, Ryusei immediately sent Tsunade to stabilize him, and she worked on him nonstop with Kanae's support then.

Their combined skill kept him from slipping past the point of recovery.

Afterward, even Ryusei personally intervened.

He also infused Duy with a trace of his own slug-based adaptive essence, reinforcing his internal systems and preventing latent damage from spreading.

Later, he also added another small amount of yin–yang ritual essence to mend what regular healing couldn't reach.

Duy was effectively out of danger now.

His body would recover fully in time, thanks to the level of treatment he received. It would just take a while.

Guy stood up immediately when Ryusei approached, bowing awkwardly.

"Thank you for saving my father," he said, voice tight but earnest. "I… I don't know how to repay you."

Ryusei waved a hand.

"You don't need to repay anything. Your father nearly died because Madara decided to throw a mountain at him. Fixing the damage is the least I can do."

Guy swallowed hard and stepped aside as Ryusei approached the bed.

Duy tried to sit up, failed, and settled for turning his head.

"Ryusei…" he whispered. "How is… the village?"

The bond between them had obviously changed from back then.

Duy and Guy weren't blind.

Even with their simple natures, they had pieced things together over the past few years since they didn't see each other anymore.

Ryusei's meteoric rise.

His hidden clashes and rivalry against Konoha's leadership.

His final open confrontation with them was just a week ago, when he and his allies fought the very people who ruled the village, in the past and present, and stunningly came out on top.

Ryusei wasn't a promising boy anymore.

He was the sky over Konoha.

No… the sky over the entire world.

The one who decided where the light fell.

The days of training side by side, pushing each other until their legs shook, were long gone.

Especially, Duy felt that gap very clearly.

And what weighed on him now was not his injuries.

It was the question of what Ryusei had done to the village.

How far his revenge, no, retribution, had spread.

And whether the wider Konoha, at least, still stood in his good graces.

Ryusei leaned against the wall, hands still in his pockets.

"Most people here don't matter enough to count as targets. They weren't part of anything, obviously."

Duy exhaled slowly, listening.

Ryusei continued, voice steady.

"The only ones who faced, and will face, retribution were the ones closest to the Hokage's faction. The ones who carried out their orders or backed them from the shadows. The ones who knew exactly what they were doing. Beyond that circle, the consequences thinned out. The further someone was from them, the lighter it became. From wiping out entire clans… to nothing more than forcing someone to lower their head and kneel for the rest of their life."

He shrugged lightly.

"I'm not interested in punishing civilians or random shinobi. I only settled debts where they were actually owed."

Ryusei's tone didn't waver once.

Clear. Direct.

A simple statement of fact.

"As for why I did it… If I didn't, it would've been disrespectful to my past self. To everything I went through. You both saw how much I pushed. What's the point of all that work if you don't use it to accomplish something and change your own fate? You two know that better than anyone. So I'm sure you won't overthink it," Ryusei said with a quiet sigh.

Guy was the first to speak.

"I understand," he said softly. "If someone tries to control your whole life… You have to break out of it. Otherwise, you never grow."

Duy nodded slowly, his eyes steady despite the exhaustion.

"You followed your path," he murmured. "A man… no, anyone with a dream… has to honor the struggle that brought them there. Even if others fear the result."

Guy clenched his fists.

"And if someone tried to stop me from protecting Father… or stop us from training… I'd fight them too."

Duy managed a faint smile.

"We may not agree with every choice… but we understand why you walked that road."

Ryusei didn't respond, but both of them could tell he accepted their answer.

In truth, Ryusei had taken Duy's condition a bit harder than he expected.

When he first learned how close Duy came to dying, his mood had dropped instantly despite the greatest victory.

Seeing him alive now brought a quiet relief Ryusei didn't show often.

Duy was one of the very few people in his life, maybe the only one outside of the women close to him, who had ever helped him sincerely, without expecting anything in return, from the beginning.

A simple bond, but real.

Ryusei wasn't about to let someone like that die.

And the truth was, Duy had ended up in danger precisely because of him.

It was Ryusei who approached Duy during his last mission, nudging him back toward the village early.

That single change had disrupted the Hokage faction's plans for Duy to be safely out of the way.

It put him directly in Madara's path.

Ryusei knew it.

He knew the moment Duy returned, he would cross with Madara.

So seeing him alive now… was something Ryusei was genuinely grateful for.

Ryusei stayed with them a while longer.

The talk drifted toward lighter topics at first, training stories, Guy's ridiculous morning routines, Duy's old missions, but each line carried something deeper underneath.

They ended up speaking about "youth," about how the greatest journey always starts with one step, and how showing up every day mattered more than any sudden burst of talent.

Duy repeated one of his usual lines about defeating the version of yourself from yesterday, and Ryusei, surprisingly, agreed with him.

He added that patience was the real test, that most people quit right before the next step mattered.

Guy listened like every word was carved into stone.

Duy smiled faintly, comforted by the familiarity of the philosophy he had lived by.

For a moment, the room felt almost like the old days, just three people talking about getting stronger, about purpose, about pushing forward.

Eventually, Ryusei stood up.

"That's enough for today," he said. "Rest. Both of you."

Duy nodded.

Guy bowed again, grateful.

Ryusei gave them one last look, then stepped out of the room quietly, disappearing into the hallway like he'd never been there at all.

However, before leaving the hospital entirely, Ryusei shifted his chakra and vanished from sight, slipping through the halls without anyone noticing. In the next heartbeat, he reappeared inside the hospital director's spacious office.

It was Tsunade's room now.

Stacks of reports covered her wide desk, half-finished forms and medical summaries scattered in organized chaos.

The curtains were drawn open, letting the late-evening light spill across the paperwork.

Tsunade didn't look up at first.

She was still reading, pen tapping lightly against the edge of a folder.