"What's your name?"
"My name's Hashirama. What about you?"
"My name's Madara. Why won't you tell me your family name?"
"Because I'm a ninja. If I tell people my surname carelessly, I could die."
"So you're just like me."
The two children stood by the water, skipping small stones. Uchiha Madara's stone skipped three or four times across the river with a series of slaps before falling into the water, while Senju Hashirama's stone skipped seven or eight times in a row before it finally sank.
Back then, Uchiha Madara had only been a child, an ordinary ninja studying ninjutsu. He had skipped class and run to the river merely to escape the suffocatingly harsh lessons. He wanted freedom; he did not want to spend every day endlessly studying ninjutsu... But his father had told him that if he did not quickly master powerful ninjutsu, he could easily be killed in this world...
Yet Uchiha Madara did not believe that. Hadn't he been living perfectly well all this time? His father was alive and well, so was his mother, and his younger brothers had all been living well too...
Then why was ninjutsu so important? Why was it that, even now that he was a ninja... he could not casually reveal his surname to others? Uchiha Madara did not know what meaning there was in such hardship.
Now, he had met Hashirama. He did not know Hashirama's surname; he only knew his name. For the first time, he felt that he had found a truly good friend, and for the first time, he experienced a kind of happiness beyond practicing ninjutsu...
Hashirama was smiling at him too. He was good at skipping stones. With another casual throw, his stone skipped seven or eight times again. Unwilling to be outdone, Uchiha