"Fugaku."
"You are the Uchiha Clan Head."
"You need not wait for my decision on everything."
Seated on Xia Zhuxing's back, Fugaku bowed his head solemnly.
"I understand."
Xia Zhuxing carried him into the thick Mist.
The gray-black figure soon grew indistinct.
Even after leaving the stone slab behind entirely, Xia Zhuxing neither called back nor complained about this extra task.
Xia Zhuxing simply carried Fugaku steadily forward in the direction Lie Yang had indicated.
That quiet composure was unlike that of many ninja cats.
The thick Mist closed in again.
Only Lie Yang remained on the sea.
The upheaval in Konoha had finally come to a true end.
Danzo had been arrested.
Root had been absorbed into ANBU.
The older generation of leaders had stepped down one after another.
Tsunade and Jiraiya had begun taking over Konoha.
The Uchiha no longer pinned all their hopes on gaining the village's acceptance as they once had.
As for Lie Yang...
No one in Konoha dared treat him as an ordinary Missing-nin anymore.
The God of Shinobi.
The Pale God.
Those two titles were spreading rapidly through the Land of Fire.
One represented his power, which stood above every shinobi of the age.
The other represented the annihilation of all things after his pure white lightning descended.
Whether Konoha acknowledged it or not, a new name now stood at the pinnacle of power in the Shinobi World.
Lie Yang sat back down in the center of the stone slab.
He untied the pack Fugaku had brought earlier.
Along with intelligence on the Land of Water, it contained numerous copied historical scrolls from Konoha and the Land of Fire.
These documents were not ninjutsu.
Nor did they concern the core teachings of any shinobi clan.
But their records stretched much further into the