Some Explanations

As for the timeline, this book would basically follow Zhihu contributor Dark Red Danyang's article, "Naruto Timeline Compilation" (permission has already been obtained from the author; anyone interested in the detailed analysis could check it out on Zhihu).

In fact, Naruto itself never had any such thing as a Konoha calendar. This kind of division was only meant to give everyone a more intuitive understanding. I also knew that most Qidian fanfics treated Naruto's first appearance as Leaf Year 60, but the problem was that I had looked through a great deal of material without finding the exact source of that claim. Dark Red Danyang, on the other hand, provided an image from the Book of Formation, which took the end of the Fourth Shinobi World War as its reference point and stated that Hashirama Senju founded Konoha 67 years earlier. In other words, the Fourth Shinobi World War ended in Leaf Year 68. The Book of Formation did indeed have plenty of bugs, but in the absence of any definitive explanation in the manga, it still had considerable reference value. Naruto was twelve when he first appeared and seventeen during the Fourth Shinobi World War, so by this logic, the manga began in Leaf Year 63. Of course, this did not actually make much difference. Readers who were not used to this system could simply subtract three years from my timeline. For example, the protagonist appeared in Leaf Year 41, but you could mentally read it as Leaf Year 38 instead. It would not affect anything. The reason I was explaining this so thoroughly was because my experience from the previous two books had taught me that if certain things were not made clear, the comments on the first few chapters would definitely get rather "nitpicky" (.︿.).

Since I had brought it up, I might as well address a few possible timeline bugs that could come up later. I would not explain them again in the future.

First, the matter of class divisions. For a profession like ninja—one that was in short supply, depended on youth, and placed great importance on age—I believed people generally would not miss the proper age for enrollment. For example, the Konoha Twelve Shinobi were all twelve in Part One, while Neji and the others who had graduated one class ahead were just thirteen. From this, it was clear that people in the same class were basically the same age. Going further back, Jiraiya, Orochimaru, and Tsunade were the same age. Further back still, the Third Hokage, Danzo, and those elders were also all the same age. From this, it could be seen that students in the same Ninja Academy class were generally of the same age.

As for the claim that Konoha's jonin were basically all from Kakashi's class, it largely came from the events of manga chapter 599. Obito arrived late and happened to run into Kakashi and the others heading home after receiving their enrollment notices, and that group included Kakashi, Rin, Might Guy, and others. But the problem was that Namiashi Raidō, the oldest person in that scene, and Gekko Hayate, the youngest, were a full eight years apart. How could they possibly have been in the same class? Even more awkwardly, Kakashi graduated at five, so the Kakashi in that scene had to have been under five, while Gekko Hayate was three years younger than Kakashi. So Gekko Hayate was not even two years old when he enrolled in that scene????? Even if people in Naruto developed early, sending a two-year-old to school was far too absurd. There was also the scene in chapter 599 where the Chunin Exams explicitly placed Anko, Gekko Hayate, and the others in the same exam. That was actually easy to understand—just like Hyuga Neji, people taking the Chunin Exams at the same time were not necessarily from the same class. Incidentally, Kakashi became a chunin at six, while Obito and Rin did not even graduate until they were nine, yet they appeared in the same Chunin Exams. In short, Naruto had quite a lot of age-related bugs, so I would still arrange these characters into classes above and below one another according to their ages. In the protagonist's class, the only named characters would be Yūhi Kurenai, Asuma, Ibiki, Shizune, and Mizuki.

Second, since class assignments had come up, let me also discuss personality and characterization. The descriptors I used in the previous chapter were based on what they were like as children. Take Mizuki, for example—he could not possibly have been capable of putting on that hypocritical facade as a child, could he? After all, that sort of thing required "talent" as well. Some readers might say that Mizuki was not necessarily a bad person as a child, but in the original work, he was already jealous of Iruka as a child because Iruka received encouragement and help from others. While later experiences may have played a part in that, it should also have been inseparable from his inherently extreme personality. Next, Asuma was a steady and easygoing person in the original work, but he had also gone through a delinquent phase as a child. This part was originally added by the anime, but the manga later showed Asuma smoking as a child as well. While it was hard to say that he was definitely a delinquent back then, he was probably rebellious. Moreover, considering that he later became one of the Guardian Shinobi Twelve, and that in the manga he apologized before the Third Hokage's grave for having once left Konoha and acted according to his own likes and dislikes, it should be enough to show that he went through a rebellious period in his youth. In short, please do not completely equate the characters in the current stage of this book with their original versions. A person's personality changed over time, along with their experience and knowledge.

Third, the issue of Zabuza's age. In manga chapter 14, Kakashi said that Zabuza killed every examinee in the graduation exam ten years earlier, forcing the Hidden Mist Village to reform. But Zabuza's profile stated that he died at twenty-six and graduated from the Ninja Academy at nine. If we calculated based on him being twenty-six when he died, then he would have been sixteen when he graduated. Staying back seven or eight years just to bully elementary-school children was hardly something worth boasting about, was it? Here, let us just assume Kakashi left out a "few." After all, as the first enemy to appear after Kakashi's introduction, Zabuza being the same age as Kakashi—twenty-six at the time—gave their rivalry a greater sense of destiny.

There were actually many, many more bugs in Naruto, but I probably would not touch on them much in the early stages, so I would not waste any more words on them here.