The next day, inside Night City.
Once known as Hozuki Castle, this prison city had struck fear into countless criminals across the Ninja World. Now it had changed completely.
Its streets were unsettlingly empty. The cells that had once held prisoners stood open, one after another, in an eerie silence.
Only the sea breeze slipped through cracks in the walls, howling through the deserted cellblocks.
With the death of Mui, the former lord of Hozuki Castle, the Heavenly Prison seals placed inside the prisoners had lifted on their own.
The criminals imprisoned there for years had thought freedom had finally come. Before they could celebrate, they were met with a bloody crackdown.
After all, to Obito and Madara, who possessed the Impure World Reincarnation Jutsu, the dead were far more useful than the living...
At that moment, in Night City's underground laboratory.
A massive statue stood at the center of the laboratory.
It towered several stories high, its surface somewhere between stone and flesh.
Several thick tubes pierced its torso and limbs, connecting it to the dense array of instruments around it.
The needles on the instruments moved slowly, accompanied by a low hum like a heartbeat.
Orochimaru stood before the instruments, his golden snake eyes fixed on the moving needles. The slight curl of his lips betrayed his fascination.
"How beautiful..."
"Whether I was with the Akatsuki or at Uchiha Kou's side, I knew this marvel was extraordinary.
"But studying it myself truly lets me appreciate its wonders."
He gazed at the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, memories of the five years he had spent researching at Kou's side rising unbidden. He murmured,
"Chakra, the Ten-Tails, the Otsutsuki... Was the Ninja World we live in changed by these beings from beyond the heavens?"
"What I once thought was