As she became more awake, Shizune looked toward Tsunade and Kaede. It was dark, but as a ninja, she could still tell that Kaede was awake.
She glanced at the still-sleeping Tsunade, then quietly got up and walked to Kaede's side.
"You're awake, Kaede? How are you feeling?" she whispered.
Kaede let out a breath. "My chakra pathways are fine now, but my muscles are still sore. It's hard to sit up. Looks like I'll need some time to fully recover."
"Mhm," Shizune nodded gently. "Medical ninjutsu can only heal wounds, it can't speed up cell regeneration. Torn muscles can be fused back together, but the inner tissue still needs time to fully heal. Oh, right! You must be thirsty. I'll get you some water, "
She paused mid-sentence and stood up, walking over to the table. Looking back at Kaede with a slightly awed expression, she added:
"By the way, Kaede… you were amazing out there today. You even beat Lady Chiyo… I bet in just a few more days, your name will be known across the entire ninja world."
Kaede tilted his head slightly and smiled.
"Probably."
In his dream, the scenes that appeared left Kaede uncertain, he couldn't tell whether it was all just his imagination or if it had genuinely been influenced by the Illusory Clock.
Still, he had a gut feeling that the abilities he saw in that dream most likely belonged to the twelve "scales" of the Illusory Clock. He just couldn't tell which scale corresponded to which power.
"If only I could unlock time to stop…" Kaede pondered quietly.
In the world of Naruto, the ability to stop time would practically make one invincible. With it, even facing someone like Kaguya Ōtsutsuki could turn into something straight out of a power fantasy.
If time is frozen, then even the massive gap between Kage-level and Six Paths-level becomes meaningless. You could, for example, pluck out the Rinnegan eyes while time stands still, then slowly absorb the power and chakra of the Tailed Beasts, draining every last drop of Six Paths-level power and taking it for yourself.
With that thought in mind, Kaede closed his eyes.
The Illusory Clock materialized before him. He glanced at the third scale and saw that while the fog over it had thinned slightly, it was still far from lifting completely. At the current pace, it would likely take another two or three years to fully unlock.
After checking his other abilities and confirming that nothing had changed, Kaede shook his head and stopped wasting energy on idle thoughts.
Since coming to this world and obtaining the Illusory Clock, he still had many unanswered questions about its abilities, but there were some patterns he had gradually come to understand.
First of all,
Its abilities unlocked gradually over time, and this unlocking process seemed to be fixed, almost entirely unaffected by anything else.
Kaede had a bold theory: that the Illusory Clock did not yet possess its full power, but so long as time continued to flow, it could draw strength from that flow to recover, growing gradually more complete.
Every year or so, the range of his time acceleration would expand slightly, which further supported this idea.
Additionally,
While the Clock's "time energy" seemed unlimited, it actually wasn't. There was an upper limit, although that limit appeared to be increasing over time.
Kaede had discovered this through experimentation.
He had once plucked a strand of his own hair and used time reversal on it, not just a few seconds or minutes, but over ten years in an instant.
The hair vanished immediately. And at that moment, the entire Illusory Clock dimmed, from radiant gold to a faint silver, with only a small trace of gold left at the very bottom.
From that, Kaede concluded that the golden hue represented time energy.
The reason his time acceleration and time reversal abilities had always seemed practically unlimited was because the rate of energy consumption was far slower than its recovery rate.
However, reversing several years' worth of time in a single instant consumed an immense amount of time energy all at once.
Based on his observations:
The Illusory Clock currently stored enough time energy to reverse roughly fifteen years' worth of time. Reversing anything more than that in one go would completely drain it.
What would happen if it were drained entirely? Kaede didn't know. He hadn't tried, and didn't intend to, after all, there was no realistic situation where he'd need to reverse time by fifteen years.
As for where the time energy came from, Kaede still had no idea.
He only knew that after using up roughly 80% of it in one experiment, it took nearly ten full days for the Clock to return to its fully golden state.
That recovery process couldn't be sped up.
Kaede had tried killing other ninja, doing various other activities, but none of it made any difference. The energy regenerated neither faster nor slower.
It was either because an individual's "time" was too insignificant to matter, or because the time the Illusory Clock tapped into was on a completely different level, linked not to individual lifeforms, but to the world itself, or perhaps even the fabric of space.
Which of the two was correct, Kaede couldn't say for sure, but he leaned toward the latter.
The concept of individuals possessing their own separate "time" didn't make much sense. Time, as he saw it, was a measure of the world's changes, it should apply to the world as a whole.
And this wasn't baseless speculation.
Kaede had conducted a second experiment, reversing time on one hair versus ten hairs, and found that the energy consumption was exactly the same.
In other words, the cost of reversing time didn't depend on the size or amount of matter, it was entirely determined by how far back you reversed time.
Also,
Kaede discovered something else.
The maximum amount of time energy the Illusory Clock could store was not static, it was slowly increasing with time.
Much else remained unknown, but from what he'd observed so far, the Illusory Clock was continuing to "evolve" or "restore" itself over time, growing stronger, and always in ways that benefited him.
As for whether it might eventually pose a threat, Kaede wasn't sure.
At least for now, he hadn't seen any signs of that.
"If there really is a downside," he mused to himself, "it might be its overwhelming power itself. Maybe it'll slowly erode my humanity, make me lose my emotions with the passage of time."
Kaede whispered this to himself.
He instinctively felt that this might be the truth.
If he truly obtained eternity, standing alone at the pinnacle of the ninja world for hundreds or thousands of years, perhaps the emotions that made him human would gradually fade. But that was still far off, nothing he needed to worry about just yet.
Those were concerns for after he'd reached the peak of the world and grasped immortality.
Right now, he was only just at the Kage level.
If he went up against a Super-Kage level opponent, say, Nagato with the Rinnegan, just one Shinra Tensei to pull him in, followed by a soul extraction from the Human Path, and he'd die on the spot.
His current power was still far from enough. At most, he could handle most regular Kage-level enemies, but certain special ones would still be very troublesome, like Namikaze Minato with his Flying Thunder God and sealing techniques, or the Third Raikage with his monstrous speed and defense.
As Kaede pondered all this,
There was a rustling sound from the side of the bed.
Turning his head, he saw that Shizune, who had been sleeping on the innermost side, had sat up at some point. She looked like she had just woken up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.
"Hmm…"
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