White Fang Incident

Uchiha Narong sat cross-legged on the training ground by the Naka River, the chakra gathered at his fingertips like an unstable wisp of blue flame.

The wind of Konoha Year 42 swept fallen leaves past the black hair on his forehead, carrying with it the shouts of other shinobi from the distant practice field.

He closed his eyes and felt the chakra of three natures flowing inside him—the fierce heat of fire, the sharpness of wind, the restlessness of lightning. The triple marks left on the test paper, burned, torn, and charred black, were still vivid before his eyes. They were the most practical foundation he had gained in the half year he had survived in this shinobi world.

"Rasengan..." he murmured to himself, trying to compress and spin the chakra in his palm.

A faint hum rose in the air, but the chakra quickly collapsed into specks of light. He knew where the difficulty of this technique lay. Chakra shape transformation required extreme control, and right now, he had not even completed the most basic water balloon training.

But compared to that, what distracted him more was the strange atmosphere that had filled the village recently.

Whenever he passed the bulletin board, he could always see villagers in twos and threes whispering about the notice of a "mission failure," their gazes stabbing like needles toward a certain residence below Hokage Rock.

"Lord Hatake Sakumo came back early from a mission again."

In the corridor of the Ninja Academy, several upper-year students huddled together and exchanged information.

Narong pretended to organize his ninja tool pouch, but his ears caught every syllable.

"I heard the one he gave up was an S-rank mission! Just because his teammates were injured..."

"How embarrassing. Someone like that deserves to be called 'Konoha's White Fang'?"

He remembered the undercurrents in the original work at this point in time. The Third Hokage, Sarutobi Hiruzen, was pushing to make shinobi selection more civilian-based, while Hatake Sakumo, as a representative of the traditional shinobi clans, had already become prestigious enough to threaten the balance among the higher-ups.

Danzo's Root organization took the opportunity to spread rumors, while the comrades he had saved remained silent—the essence of this tragedy was political struggle, and White Fang was nothing more than a pawn.

At dusk, Narong slipped into the training ground of the Uchiha Clan District.

The Two-Tomoe Sharingan glimmered faintly in the twilight, and kunai struck the bull's-eyes a hundred meters away one after another.

These eyes were his greatest secret in this world, one he had not even revealed to his clan.

On the night he awakened them, he dreamed of the giant statues of the Valley of the End and coiling chakra chains. When he woke, tomoe had already been branded into his eyes.

Now, his taijutsu and throwing techniques were already close to genin level, but compared to the looming Third Shinobi World War, this progress was still a drop in the bucket.

"If developing the Rasengan fails, I at least have to master Wind Release nature transformation first. If that really doesn't work, developing compound ninjutsu is fine too. Developing wind and fire should be a bit easier than the Rasengan."

He formed hand seals and spat out a stream of air, slicing through three falling leaves.

This was inspiration he had gained from Namikaze Minato's future battles. The wind nature could strengthen the Rasengan, and it could also combine with Fire Release.

But what was more urgent right now was time—before the war broke out in Konoha Year 47, he needed enough strength to survive on the battlefield.

A few days later, Narong ran into a scene outside a dango shop. The silver-haired boy Kakashi walked quickly past with his head lowered, while Uchiha Obito and Nohara Rin followed behind him, wanting to speak but hesitating.

Obito waved his fist and stressed that "mission rules aren't important, comrades are what matter."

Kakashi's reply was cold as ice: "People who break the rules don't deserve to be called shinobi."

Narong bit through the three-colored dango in his mouth.

He knew that White Fang's belief was being twisted by his son, and all of this was about to end in the most tragic way.

He could almost see the cables of fate trembling: Danzo's scheme, the Third's tacit consent, the villagers' ignorance, the betrayal of comrades...

These fragments were piecing together into a hero's grave.

"Should I interfere?" he asked himself.

But his seven-year-old body and his status as someone who had not yet graduated were like shackles. What was more, he knew very well that changing key history might trigger even worse chain reactions—such as making Obito fall into darkness even earlier, or accelerating the arrival of the Night of the Uchiha Massacre.

On a drizzly morning, Konoha sank beneath low pressure.

Through the classroom window, Narong saw ANBU shinobi sweep across the rooftops like crows, heading straight for the Hatake Residence.

By lunch break, the terrible news had spread through the campus. Konoha's White Fang had taken his own life.

"He abandoned a mission for such a weak reason. I guess he really had no face left to keep living, huh?"

A teacher sneered.

Narong walked out of the classroom.

The rain blurred his vision, but it made his Sharingan see even more clearly.

He saw the Third's face on the towering Hokage Rock, like a stone carving. He saw members of Root smiling at the corner of an alley. He also saw the shinobi who had been saved mixed in with the crowd, the brim of his umbrella pressed low enough to hide his entire face.

At that moment, he understood the cruel logic of this world with absolute clarity. The boundary between light and darkness had never been clear, and the foundation of Konoha had long since been hollowed out by schemes for power.

Pitifully few people came to pay their respects at White Fang's funeral.

Narong hid in the trees by the Naka River and watched Kakashi stand alone before the gravestone.

In the rain, that silver hair looked like a broken blade.

"Ah, seeing this kind of tragedy unfold right in front of me still feels a little hard to take."

Narong spoke softly, unsure whether he was saying it to the dead or to the tragedies of the future.

He spread his palm, and chakra gathered once more. This time, the blue ball of light spun and held for several seconds, stirring the falling threads of rain.

—Some changes took time, but the spiral had already begun to turn. Over the following months, Narong trained like a madman.

By day, he repeated basic courses at the Ninja Academy. By night, he used his Sharingan to copy every ninjutsu he saw. He discovered that the Two-Tomoe Sharingan could not only see through the trajectories of taijutsu, but also analyze the subtle flow of chakra.

Through repeatedly observing a chunin teacher's Water Release practice, he reverse-engineered the cutting principle of wind-nature chakra, and even succeeded in attaching Wind Release to his kunai.

But the Rasengan remained a bottleneck.

The chakra's rotation always went out of control in the final stage, as though it lacked some decisive "axis."

One night, he suddenly remembered the process by which Naruto developed Wind Release: Rasenshuriken. It required Shadow Clones to assist with control.

But right now, he could only maintain two ordinary clones, so this path seemed impassable.

The turning point came in the deep winter of Konoha Year 42. He thought of compound ninjutsu. Since he could not make the Rasengan right now, he would develop a compound ninjutsu of wind and fire. Since he only had three natures, he had no way to use five ultra-large-scale S-rank ninjutsu like Sarutobi Hiruzen.

Fire and wind were two natures that could enhance each other, so Narong could develop compound ninjutsu with them. After two months of tireless effort, he used the Clone Technique, one clone using Fire Release and the other using Wind Release, and successfully grasped the balance, developing a wind-fire compound ninjutsu. Its power was at least three times greater than the Great Fireball Technique, enough to count as an A-rank ninjutsu no matter how one looked at it. During this time, his mastery of wind-nature transformation became even stronger, and he understood that the Rasengan needed a stable chakra core as a fulcrum. With his current grasp of transformation, he was still a little short.

The aftermath of the White Fang Incident had not yet settled.

On the day news spread that Kakashi had graduated early, Narong saw him and Obito's sparring match on the practice field.

Chidori's shrill cry tore through the air, while Obito's clumsy Fire Release was like a farce.

But when Kakashi's "Lightning Release: Earth Flow" was about to hit Obito, Narong's Sharingan caught the almost imperceptible tremor in Kakashi's fingertips.

White Fang's blade, in the end, could not cut away the belief in his blood.

"The instinct to save comrades was alive in his body all along."

Narong crushed the leaf in his palm. Perhaps history really did have resilience, just like the Rasengan would still gather again after collapsing.

In the spring of Konoha Year 43, Narong finally made the water balloon burst open in his palm. Amid the splashing water, he saw the perfect vortex outlined by chakra.

In the distance, atop Hokage Rock, the Third was assigning a mission to the Minato Team, while Danzo's shadow still peered from the dark.

But at this moment, he was no longer who he had been.

The hand seals for Wind Release on the scroll were reflected in the depths of his Sharingan, and chakra surged through his meridians in threefold waves.

He looked toward the eternally snow-covered border of the Land of Fire and thought of the flames of war that would ignite there five years later.

"There's still time."

He said softly to himself, the glow of the Rasengan flowing in his palm.