Eight Trigrams Seal

Land of Fire, Hidden Leaf Village.

Although friction between the nations never ceased, Konoha had proven its formidable strength through the First and Second Great Ninja Wars, so merchants flowed in endlessly and traffic bustled through its streets.

Naruto looked up at the familiar gates. He had never expected to see them again.

"Mr. Genichiro, thank you for taking care of us these past few days," Mizuki's mother said gratefully.

Naruto nodded slightly. Since the mother and daughter were both ordinary people, they had inevitably wasted more time on the road.

Dressed in loose clothing, Naruto looked no different from an ordinary traveler.

The young Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, had been quite bold. Even though the Third Great Ninja War could erupt at any moment, he still allowed merchants and travelers to enter the Hidden Leaf Village.

Though the questioning process was somewhat cumbersome, judging by the nearby merchants' reactions, Konoha's procedures were already quite simple compared to those of other hidden villages.

Friendly, harmonious, peaceful—those were the mother and daughter's first impressions of Konoha.

When they turned around, intending to thank him again, their benefactor had already vanished.

The two looked at each other.

"Kurama, can you contact the other tailed beasts?" Naruto asked inwardly as he wandered Konoha's streets as casually as any other traveler.

"I can, but none of them give a damn about me," Kurama snorted.

Naruto burst out laughing. He was the biggest tsundere of them all, yet he still had the nerve to talk about others.

"At this point in the timeline, where should I be living?" Naruto asked, surveying the surrounding buildings.

Ever since he had begun living alone, Hiruzen Sarutobi had always instilled this idea in him:

You are an orphan with no parents. The place you live in now is something I fought to secure for you from the village.

As a result, he knew absolutely nothing about where his biological parents had once lived.

"Keep going straight, then turn left at the second intersection..."

Following Kurama's directions, Naruto found the home where his parents in this life had lived.

"Unexpectedly luxurious..." Naruto muttered, stroking his chin.

He had thought that his mother, the Nine-Tails' previous Jinchuriki, would have been targeted in every way just like him.

"Minato Namikaze may not be Hokage yet, but he is still a jonin. Your mother can't be promoted to jonin because of her status, but because of Mito Uzumaki, Hiruzen Sarutobi doesn't dare mistreat her," Kurama explained from personal experience.

"At this time, Minato Namikaze should have been assigned to the battlefield near Iwagakure."

"That may be true, but I can't get in right now," Naruto sighed helplessly.

Sure enough, even with his mother's special status, she could not escape ANBU surveillance.

"Unlike you, your mother has a terrible temper. Those ANBU don't dare watch her too closely," Kurama said mockingly.

Out of all his Jinchuriki, this one had lived the most miserably.

Naruto rolled his eyes and could not be bothered to say more.

Click!

A red-haired woman emerged from the house, carrying a basket of vegetables.

"Hm?" Kushina Uzumaki instinctively looked toward a distant street corner. Something there seemed to stir a strange palpitation in her heart.

"ANBU? Doesn't seem like it..."

Kushina Uzumaki muttered a few words but did not dwell on it. In Konoha, those who could afford to provoke her did not want to, while those who could not afford to provoke her...

Wanted even less to provoke her.

She usually treated such strange spying as ANBU business.

Her past experience told her that it usually was.

"Minato got sent out on another mission," Kushina Uzumaki sighed.

She had planned to make sukiyaki today.

"Sukiyaki for one person? I should make something else..."

After a long while, Naruto slowly revealed half his body and watched several figures disappear into the distance.

"I almost got a game over."

"Hm?" Kurama looked at him in confusion. Although he already knew Naruto inside out, he still could not understand the new terms Naruto occasionally blurted out.

"It means getting screwed," Naruto explained.

That glance from his mother had drawn the ANBU straight over. If he had not slipped away so quickly, he would have already been discovered.

He took several strides to the courtyard wall, then leaped upward.

Kushina Uzumaki looked at the ingredients in her basket and nodded in satisfaction.

Though she had considered cooking something else, for some reason, she had still chosen ingredients for sukiyaki while shopping.

After closing the door, Kushina Uzumaki set the basket down somewhere relatively safe.

She rubbed her fists together and turned on the lights.

"Are you coming out on your own so I can beat you up, or should I drag you out and beat you up?"

Though she rarely went on missions, that did not mean her senses had dulled enough for her to fail to notice someone inside her house.

Naruto stepped out of the kitchen and looked at the woman before him—his mother in every sense of the word.

"I thought about it for a long time, but now that we're face-to-face, I don't know what I should call you."

"???" Kushina Uzumaki's imposing air faltered. Calling her "you" so respectfully was far too strange.

Especially since this half-grown boy gave her a sense of closeness that seemed to come from their bloodline.

"I should still call you Mother," Naruto sighed helplessly. This was so complicated.

"???"

Kushina Uzumaki was completely thrown into chaos.

What the hell was all this?!

How old were she and Minato? Even if they had a child, there was no way he could be this big already, right?

Besides, she had never even given birth?!

Yet she had an instinctive certainty that the boy before her truly was her child.

"Can you explain it to me? I'm a little confused," Kushina Uzumaki asked softly after hesitating for a moment.

It was as though she feared her usual bad temper would frighten the child before her.

If friends familiar with Kushina had witnessed this scene, their eyes would have fallen out of their heads.

Since when had Konoha's Red Hot-Blooded Habanero used such a gentle tone on anyone other than Minato?

"Of course." Naruto nodded and recounted everything that had happened to him in Rōran.

"So you're my son from the future? You were accidentally brought to this era by the Ryūmyaku?" After hearing him out, Kushina Uzumaki felt only astonishment.

She did not doubt the truth of his words in the slightest.

"You believe me?" Naruto asked in surprise. Had his mother not even considered the possibility that he was a liar?

"Oh? Then how are you going to prove it?" Kushina Uzumaki leaned closer, wiggled her brows, and asked with a smile.

Naruto instinctively took two steps back and coughed twice.

"This may be a little disrespectful."

As he spoke, he lifted his shirt and quickly channeled the chakra in his body toward his abdomen.

Stimulated by chakra, an Eight Trigrams Seal, black as ink and as exquisite as a master's painting, appeared on his abdomen.

"This is... the Eight Trigrams Seal?!!"

Kushina Uzumaki's pupils constricted, and her whole expression instantly darkened.

Born into the Uzumaki Clan, she understood better than anyone what this seal represented.

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A few minutes late.