Time flies, and for this world, a new year quietly arrived.
Even amid the tense situation in the ninja world, things loosened slightly during the new year. To celebrate this rare occasion, nearly every household took time off to relax.
Compared to last year, ninjas were hardly dying on the battlefield anymore. The major ninja villages had tacitly begun shrinking their respective territories and entering an arms race, yet the dark clouds of war still drifted above the entire ninja world.
Though everyone laughed and danced, they all knew full well that there might not be many happy days like this left. The current ninja world was like a pressure cooker: invisible pressure and all kinds of forces were urging and squeezing its contents.
If not for the strategic deterrence each side possessed, war would probably have descended upon this world long ago. Yet because of strategic weapons, equipment, and military arms races, the world had strangely maintained a relatively rare balance.
Konoha possessed a massive army equipped with Blut Arterie and Blut Vene, as well as Reverse Summoning squad formations developed by its ninjutsu research division. It could be said that no one surpassed it in the art of ambushes and squad combat. And in large-scale army warfare, Konoha had also used its year-end ninja exercises to prove that it was still the number one ninja village in the world.
On the other hand, the other two great powers had not achieved peace by sitting around doing nothing.
The Sand Ninja and Stone Ninja had jointly developed intelligent cores, pushing puppet techniques to new heights. Nearly every puppeteer could carry out remote-control operations, issue commands, and launch long-range attacks.
Though the Sand Ninja were not powerful on the front lines, combined with the Stone Ninja's earthworks, the defensive line