" Haku?"
Neji heard the voice. His eyebrows lifted slightly, and he turned to see two girls, one tall and one short.
Neji knew the shorter girl. She was indeed Haku, who had been a boy in the original story.
But Neji's gaze didn't linger on Haku. Instead, it settled on the taller girl standing in front of her.
The girl was very beautiful. More importantly, she had an eerily bewitching air about her.
"Hm?"
Neji felt that the girl looked familiar, as if he'd seen her somewhere before, but for the moment, he couldn't remember where.
Business at Ju Restaurant was slow. Aside from Neji and Uchiha Hikari, there was no one else on the second floor.
So while Neji studied the girl with curiosity, she also noticed him and Uchiha Hikari. Her eyes glimmered faintly as she examined the two of them with interest.
The instant their eyes met, Neji instinctively turned his head away.
Orochimaru quickly looked away as well, then took Haku to a table beside Neji's.
Neji narrowed his eyes slightly. At last, he remembered why the girl before him seemed so inexplicably familiar.
The girl was none other than Orochimaru, who had changed bodies using Living Corpse Reincarnation.
In the original story, Orochimaru had used a woman's body when he faced Hiruzen Sarutobi during the Konoha Crush Plan.
By his reckoning, the Konoha Crush Plan wasn't far off.
But the plot had already diverged greatly from the original story. Whether Orochimaru would destroy Konoha remained to be seen.
Neji glanced at Haku beside Orochimaru from the corner of his eye, his eyebrows rising slightly.
He hadn't expected Haku to be with Orochimaru!
Had Zabuza not defected?
It seemed that Uchiha's arrival in Kumogakure had indirectly changed Kirigakure's political landscape.
Neji took a bite of