The most valuable thing the notes gave Ryusei wasn’t a new secret Senju technique. It was a history, in detail, that no one in his past life’s story had ever bothered to tell.

They explained why the Senju had “vanished without a trace overnight,” and why his existence could never be reconciled with the Hokage’s faction, no matter what.

After Hashirama, Tobirama inherited both the village and the clan.

To realize his and his late brother’s vision of a centralized Konoha, where the village, not the clans, controlled the purse, the walls, and the sword, Tobirama chose to mothball his own house first.

With the weight of Hashirama’s near-mythic reputation behind him, and his own iron credibility and prestige, Tobirama had enough backing among the elders, never unanimous, but decisive, and almost absolute support among the ordinary clansmen, perhaps eighty or ninety percent.

That allowed him to do what no other clan head could in any universe: shutter the Senju compound, close the treasury, dissolve the guard, and fold everyone into the village census.

Casually erasing nearly a thousand years of history.

Soft measures did most of the work. Keep the surname if you want, but clan privileges were gone. Promotions came faster for those who put “village” before “clan.”

Housing grants in civilian districts. A standardized Academy curriculum for the new generations.

Fewer clan-only techniques, more village-first doctrine. Indoctrinate the youth, pull them away from tradition.

Marriage barriers fell. People could marry freely now, raising the civilian talent floor and diluting Senju blood into the wider pool. Dowries flowed in reverse. Licensing rules clipped private scrolls.

No more clan patrols. No private militias. Archives “secured” by the village for safekeeping.

Even if other clans might have been in the best position to snap up Senju bloodlines through marriage, offering heavy dowries and dragging Tobirama’s vision of a unified, balanced village right back into the old clan struggle, things played out differently.

The two great clans left at the time were Uchiha and Hyūga, but neither moved in.

The Uchiha were too proud, weighed down by history with the Senju. The Hyūga, too cautious, unwilling to offend Tobirama directly.

So the openings fell to smaller and mid-sized clans.

The smaller ones got stronger in the short term, though most of them were later absorbed outright by the village during Hiruzen’s era, a process Tobirama might have foreseen.

The mid-sized clans gained the most, cementing themselves as the Hokage faction’s natural allies in politics: medium clans and Hokage against the giants like suppressed Uchiha and the cowardly Hyuga, and the leftovers of the smaller ones.

Civilians also entered the mix. Many wealthy families, without bloodline prestige but rich in coin and status, offered appealing matches.

And not every marriage was about money. Freed Senju members were still people, and for many, looks, temperament, and compatibility outweighed pure clan politics. 

Most members accepted Tobirama’s decision right away. Not out of fear alone, but because the village gave them something back: promotions, steady stipends, and marriages beyond the old walls. They didn’t lose anything obvious; their bloodline talents still remained.

But without elders arranging spouses, people chased their own tastes: looks, temperament, prospects.

From a far bigger pool, better matches were made, and Senju blood quietly spread across the village.

There were hard measures too, just quieter. Surveillance lists. Restricted access to certain sealed rooms. Audit teams that always arrived when the elders gathered too often.

Tobirama endured the grumbling because optics and blood ties still mattered.

And because he could. While he lived, dissent stayed as words. The ten or twenty percent who disagreed did so in silence.

They kept scroll copies. Coded sayings. Gatherings disguised as family meals that were really headcounts. But as long as Tobirama lived, his prestige smothered their resistance.

When Tobirama died in the First War and Hiruzen took the hat, the balance shifted.

The hardline elders, Ryusei’s grandfather and father among them, saw their window.

They reconnected, spoke louder, and tested politics. They didn’t openly threaten the Hokage, but they threatened “unity” by trying to resurrect an independent Senju will.

For Hiruzen and Danzo, that was enough.

Danzo’s Root was born as the black glove, the hidden knife, and the scapegoat. Erasing a lineage takes time; you can’t kill it in one night.

And who would suspect the late Hokage’s own students of dismantling the clan with their own hands?

But war is the perfect solvent. During the Second Shinobi War, key revivalists began to vanish. Borrowed knives. Missions that turned suicidal. Ambushes with no survivors.

It was Root’s style, sanctioned from above and swallowed by the fog. By the war’s end, the revivalist spine snapped.

Some deaths were symbolic, not strategic. Nawaki stood out most in the notes.

He wasn’t an organizer or a schemer, just a banner, Hashirama’s blood, loudly dreaming of Hokage. If you wanted to kill the idea of a Senju return, you cut down the symbol cleanly, with deniability.

And Nawaki truly could have become Hokage. His bloodline prestige, his raw talent, it was all there. Hiruzen still expected to rule for decades and wouldn’t risk a brat stealing his power.

Danzo shared the sentiment, perhaps even more fiercely. He hated idealists like Nawaki.

Tsunade was different. Too close to Hiruzen, uninterested in the hat, already part of the post-Senju structure. Killing her would cost more than it paid.

Decades later, the policy did exactly what it was meant to do. The Senju name wasn’t outlawed, just made inconvenient.

Almost no one carried it openly anymore. Tsunade was the rare exception. The rest had dispersed, their blood folded into “civilian” stock.

The talent pool rose. New shinobi appeared, “civilians” with suspiciously strong chakra and instincts.

Ryusei even suspected that cases like Minato might trace back to quiet Senju lines. He couldn’t prove it, but the pattern fit.

“So there’s no coexistence,” Ryusei thought. “Not with them. Not on terms they dictate. The only language they respect is force. Or at least me being a variable too costly to try and remove without shaking the table.”

The notes confirmed one last thing. Tobirama’s ruthlessness had always pointed home first.

He broke his own clan to prove a doctrine. Hiruzen and Danzo only finished the work he couldn’t. The Will of Fire burned hottest against its own wood.

Ryusei never considered reaching out to the few Senju remnants still in Konoha. It was far too late.

Back in Tobirama’s time, thousands had already severed ties and folded into the village.

Generations later, most descendants had no memory of their clan, many not even knowing their own bloodline by design.

Before the Second War, when hundreds of semi-organized revivalists still held contact, he might have led them with his mind and talents. But that window had long closed.

What remained were scattered nobodies, too weak to matter then, too broken to matter now. Most had abandoned revival, clinging only to the hope that Konoha had forgotten them.

But Konoha hadn’t. They were simply saving them for the next war, when chaos would erase them by association.

To Ryusei, seeking them out would only add weight. They weren’t allies anymore, only liabilities.

As for why any Senju revivalists remained after Tobirama’s barrage of decrees, the answer was simple.

Who lost the most when the clan disbanded? Not the ordinary members.

They still had their bloodlines, their skills, and could live freely in Konoha’s ranks.

For them, the change meant liberation: no more elders arranging marriages, seizing clan wealth, or binding them to rituals.

Backed by Tobirama and Hashirama’s prestige, the most welcomed of such ‘genius progressive, forward-looking ideas’.

They could now decide their own futures, and in the village, they were the nobles with coveted bloodlines, whereas previously in the clan, they were ‘suppressed’ by the more prestigious Senju lineages or those elders.

The ones who resisted were precisely those elders and prestigious lineages. Men who had strutted around as lords of the strongest clan in the world, living off authority and tradition.

They were used to controlling marriages, finances, and the fate of every member under them. Disbandment meant the collapse of their power.

And though the Senju never had a strict branch system like the Hyūga, they still carried the same fundamental truth Ryusei saw in all human society: structural inequality.

Stronger bloodlines dominated, and those lineages filled the Elder seats.

That Tobirama convinced most of them to vote away their own privilege was already a miracle, proof of the brothers’ overwhelming charisma.

But not all yielded. A faction remained, led by Ryusei’s grandfather, the last Great Elder, Masamune Senju, whose lineage was the most powerful outside Hashirama and Tobirama’s traditional Patriarch lineage and often the only one with enough power to contradict them.

He and a handful of unwilling elders, gathered by him, refused to let the clan’s prestige die.

At best, they held onto ten or twenty percent of the clan, mostly relatives of those lineages and a few proud, traditional youths.

But they were swimming against the current.

The younger generations were drawn into the Academy, cut off from revivalist ideals, while Tobirama and later Hiruzen steadily squeezed the faction through every method available.

By the time of the Second War, only hundreds remained. They were purged in the chaos, just as Nawaki was.

Now, only a few dozen bums survived in silence, broken men already as good as dead.

That left Ryusei as the last true Senju, not merely by blood but by heritage.

He alone carried the revivalist legacy that sought to preserve the clan’s name.

Tsunade still bore the Senju surname, unlike him, but in truth, she had long since abandoned its true meaning and identity.

In the real sense, Ryusei thought that he was the only Senju left, even if he didn’t want it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep