Sasuke, Mei Terumi, and the others had only just set out to sea when a massive whirlpool suddenly appeared. Sasuke grabbed a railing to steady himself and asked in confusion, "Why would a whirlpool appear out of nowhere, without any warning? Do you know what's going on?"
The whirlpool's appearance was so strange that Sasuke could not help asking Chojuro beside him, hoping he could offer an answer.
Chojuro frowned. "We may have accidentally entered the Land of Water's forbidden zone, the Demon Sea. They say anyone who enters the Demon Sea dies. Many ships have sailed into these waters before and never come back out."
Sasuke frowned. "Everyone? No one has ever gotten out? Did all those people die?"
"According to the legends, most of them died, but there have been exceptions," Chojuro said. "Some people reappear after ten or twenty years, or even several decades. Some have returned after more than a century. None of those survivors know how they got out. All they know is that after their ships entered the Demon Sea, they encountered all kinds of natural disasters that appeared out of nowhere, like the whirlpool we just ran into. Some encountered tsunamis and so on-all sorts of natural disasters that shouldn't have been possible."
"But I followed this same sea route to the Land of Water before," Sasuke asked in confusion. "Why didn't I enter this so-called Demon Sea then?"
This time, it was not Chojuro who answered, but Ao, who had remained silent until now. "Because the Demon Sea isn't fixed in place. It moves. It might appear here today and in another stretch of sea tomorrow. It has no fixed location."
"It's actually that extraordinary?" Sasuke said in surprise.
"That's not all," Mei Terumi added. "Time in these waters is also very