The midsummer sun at noon was slightly glaring.
After leaving the building, Uchiha Ren narrowed his eyes slightly.
“Yashiro, tell me as we walk.”
At the entrance, Uchiha Yashiro looked at the young leader before him.
Dressed in the Uchiha’s dark, high-collared uniform, he stood tall and vigorous beneath the sunlight.
Having formally taken over the reins of the hawkish faction, the young leader radiated an imposing presence.
Suppressing his excitement, Yashiro replied loudly.
“Yes, Lord Ren!”
The two walked one behind the other along the bluestone paths of the Uchiha district.
Half a step behind, Uchiha Yashiro organized the intelligence he had gathered before reporting concisely.
“This time, the clan head called a clan meeting at the shrine. According to reliable sources, aside from discussing the Third Shinobi World War, it will also concern the selection of the next clan head.”
Hearing this, Uchiha Ren did not slow his pace.
He gave a low chuckle.
“Looks like our old clan head can’t hold himself back anymore.”
After Uchiha Madara left, the old clan head had inherited the position and remained in it to this day.
By calculation, he was even slightly older than Uchiha Setsuna.
There were not many survivors from the Warring States period who could live as long as the old men in Konoha’s leadership.
In the later events of Boruto, people in their seventies and eighties could still occupy positions as elder advisers in Konoha.
By contrast, the three leaders of the Uchiha’s factions had all entered the twilight of their lives and were already preparing to pass down their authority and responsibilities.
Now, with a clan meeting being held at the family shrine—one in which only Uchiha who possessed the Three-Tomoe Sharingan could participate—the situation was clear.
Taking the current circumstances of the shinobi world and the clan into account, using the position of the next clan head as leverage to encourage the hawkish Uchiha to actively participate in the war was hardly unexpected.
After all, over the years, Uchiha Fugaku, who was more than ten years older than Ren, had suffered no shortage of losses at Ren’s hands.
With Uchiha Ren openly setting his sights on the position of clan head, Fugaku needed more than strength if he wanted to turn the tables.
For example—military achievements.
More precisely, he needed to lead the Uchiha to obtain greater influence within Konoha, thereby winning more support from within the clan.
This was also the policy that the clan head and the dove faction had pursued all along: integrating into Konoha through peaceful means.
Uchiha Yashiro was one of the pillars of the younger generation among the hawkish faction and often discussed various matters with Uchiha Ren.
Through constant exposure to Ren’s thinking, combined with his own abilities, he naturally understood the twists and turns involved.
A worried expression appeared on his face as he spoke thoughtfully.
“For ordinary battles, given the strength of the clan head and the dove faction, dealing with them shouldn’t be difficult.”
“But this time, they want to invite us aboard as well. It’s easy to imagine how much pressure the Third Hokage has placed on the clan head. I wonder what kind of benefits the Hokage has promised him.”
At this point, Uchiha Yashiro suddenly hesitated.
One look was enough for Uchiha Ren to understand what he was worried about.
He snorted.
“Given how close the old clan head is to the Hokage, I’m afraid that before we can enjoy many of those benefits, our Uchiha will already have been packaged up and sold.”
Exchanging the clan’s interests for the Hokage’s vague promises was a humiliating practice that had long been prevalent among the clan head and the dove faction.
In their words:
One day, the Uchiha will become Hokage, and the entire Konoha will belong to the Uchiha.
There’s no need to worry about temporary gains and losses.
It was the kind of thinking that made Uchiha Ren speechless.
It was like the ultimate simp in a female-oriented romance novel, endlessly watching the heroine cheat on him with her old flame—while he kept giving up benefits on behalf of the Uchiha clan.
Then, when he discovered that the heroine was pregnant—the Uchiha were fundamentally incapable of becoming Hokage—he would shed sorrowful tears as the clan argued among themselves.
After that came impotent rage, shouting about rebellion, before finally slinking away in silence—only to be wiped out along with his entire clan.
That idiotic chain of thinking, followed by such a miserable ending, left Uchiha Ren utterly speechless.
Knowing when to endure in pursuit of a greater goal was not wrong.
Trading short-term sacrifices for greater future rewards was a reasonable strategy.
But circumstances mattered.
You couldn’t simply indulge in wishful thinking and assume everything would go according to plan!
You also had to consider whether Konoha’s leadership, which was hostile toward or rejected the Uchiha and was heavily influenced by the Senju, was actually willing to accept an Uchiha becoming Hokage—and, in doing so, surrender the interests they currently controlled.
After all, the Uchiha awakened their Sharingan under the intense emotional stimulation of “losing love,” which made them exceptionally stubborn and, at times, fanatically fixated on their beliefs.
Combined with the clan’s atmosphere of strength above all and rigid superior-subordinate relationships, this made internal unity especially difficult.
Most of the time, Uchiha Ren focused on strengthening himself and uniting the hawkish faction.
As for the fan-fiction novels he had read in his previous life, where a protagonist could recruit members of other factions with just a sentence or two, that was practically a fantasy.
Shinobi might not understand politics, but they knew how to obey orders.
What happened above was reflected below.
Orders were obeyed and prohibitions enforced.
Konoha was essentially a massive military organization, while each shinobi clan was a smaller military faction within it.
The Hyūga clan had its clearly defined main and branch families.
Likewise, the three factions within the Uchiha were sharply divided.
Aside from a handful of high-ranking figures, even ordinary members of different factions were cautious about interacting with one another in their daily lives.
This division even extended to the children below them, creating an invisible wall that could nevertheless be clearly felt.
To a certain extent, the barriers within the Uchiha were even more extreme than those within the Hyūga clan.
It wasn’t that the elders of the clan failed to notice this lack of unity.
Rather, by the time they realized the problem, the ship had already become too large to turn around.
And they themselves were no longer in the prime of their lives.
All they could do was rely on the prestige they had accumulated over the years to prevent the stubborn middle-aged and elderly Uchiha from influencing the next generation too much.
Their hope of eventually forging the clan into a single whole—like when Uchiha Madara was alive and the Uchiha could stand against the Senju—was therefore placed in the younger generation.
In the original Naruto world without Uchiha Ren, Uchiha Fugaku was the only candidate.
But the arrival of a transmigrator had changed everything.
The dove faction’s First Elder, Uchiha Kagami, was also wavering between the two.
Given the dove faction’s inherently pro-Konoha position, this hesitation was already a sign that he was leaning toward the more outstanding and younger Uchiha Ren of the hawkish faction.
This undoubtedly made the old clan head anxious and also gave him the idea of staking everything on one final gamble.
As the two spoke, more and more members of the hawkish faction followed behind them.
Uchiha Tekka, Uchiha Inabi, and more than twenty other young and middle-aged Uchiha joined the procession.
After learning Uchiha Setsuna’s intentions from Uchiha Yashiro in a low voice, they looked at Uchiha Ren with increasingly respectful eyes.
The aura of dozens of people sharing the same bloodline gradually fused into a single force.
Like a mighty torrent, they marched toward Naka Shrine.
Naka Shrine stood at one end of the Naka River.
The river, which took its name from the shrine, ran through the entirety of Konoha.
It had witnessed the conflicts between the Uchiha and Senju during the Warring States period and had also witnessed the rise of the shinobi village era.
With the speed of jōnin, it did not take long for the group to leave the vast Uchiha district at the center of Konoha.
They approached the primeval forest used for the clan’s daily shinobi training and followed a forest path created with ninjutsu until they arrived at Naka Shrine, nestled within the woods.
The Uchiha clan’s ancestral shrine was not particularly different from an ordinary shrine.
They climbed the stairs and passed through a torii decorated with the clan’s fan crest.
A spacious courtyard came into view.
At the entrance to the shrine stood two Uchiha from the clan head’s dove faction, standing guard.
After bowing toward Uchiha Ren, Uchiha Inabi stepped out of the procession and took up his position guarding the entrance.