Kou ignored Mei Terumi's surprised, vaguely puzzled gaze and slowly walked up to the altar.
His footsteps were light, producing faint rustling sounds as he stepped over the shattered stone slabs.
The altar's surface was covered in runes weathered by wind and rain. They had likely once been patterns of the Uzumaki Clan, but now only blurred outlines remained.
Kou stood before the altar, his gaze falling upon the damaged mural.
The patterns on the stone wall had been worn nearly illegible by time, but a few shapes could still barely be made out:
The shape of a person holding a blade, the shape of a tree, and spiral patterns that resembled both whirlpools and the sun.
Beneath the sunlight, those patterns gleamed with a dull luster, as though silently recounting some ancient tale.
"The owner of that ocular power... was actually Indra's reincarnation from a thousand years ago, from the Era of Ninshu?"
Kou swallowed unconsciously and murmured inwardly, "This time, I've really struck gold."
The memory he had seen was brief, but the information it contained was utterly explosive.
Judging from the conversation between the old man and the middle-aged man in that memory, the era they had lived in
was very likely a period absent from all Ninja World records—the late Era of Ninshu, before the Warring States Period.
It was an age forgotten by every account, as if someone had deliberately torn that page out of the history books.
As he stroked the cold stone wall, he rapidly organized those fragmented pieces of information in his mind.
First, one thing could be confirmed from their conversation:
The ninjutsu faction that had preceded the Uchiha, along with the Ninshu factions that had preceded the Senju Clan and Uzumaki Clan, seemed to have once jointly dominated the entire