"Mmm..." With a long moan, Pakura slowly opened her eyes.
"I'm not dead?" she murmured, looking around in confusion.
This was a room, and she was lying on a bed. The gentle rocking and the salty sea smell drifting in through the window told Pakura that she was aboard a ship.
She looked over her body. It was covered in bandages, and although her wounds still ached faintly, they had mostly healed.
"Did someone from the village save me? Was that Mist Ninja lying to me?" Boundless hope immediately rose in Pakura's heart.
She got to her feet, slowly walked to the door, and pushed it open. There, she saw Sarutobi Toru sitting on the deck.
"Yo, you've recovered already?" Sarutobi Toru greeted Pakura with a smile.
"Who are you? Are you from the village?" Seeing the unfamiliar Sarutobi Toru, Pakura asked tensely in a low voice.
"Of course not. Are you still holding out hope for Sunagakure?" Sarutobi Toru answered with a smile.
Pakura's body suddenly swayed, and despair immediately appeared on her face.
"So everything that Mist Ninja said was true? The village abandoned me?" Pakura said blankly, her eyes vacant and lost.
For a moment, she felt that the goal she had worked toward all her life, the very meaning of her existence, had all turned to ashes. She completely lost the will to live.
Sarutobi Toru smiled as he studied Pakura's dim eyes. As a ninja who had been through countless battles, even after suffering the tragedy of being abandoned and betrayed by Sunagakure, Pakura normally would never have fallen into such utter despair.
The Pakura revived through Impure World Reincarnation in the Original Work had not looked as though she had lost all reason to live. The reason she was so desperate now was that