In the Land of Hot Water, a remote mountain forest where an earth-shattering battle had once taken place had now regained a semblance of peace.
Uchiha Shinichi, the "Konoha peace envoy" who had just successfully "requested" leave from the Lord Hokage under the glorious banner of "recuperating in hot springs, improving his health, and investigating local tourism resources to find new growth opportunities for Konoha's economic diversification," stood at the edge of an unremarkable cliff. His clothes fluttered in the mountain breeze, giving him something of the air of a reclusive master.
That was, of course, if one ignored his stubbornly unruly natural silver curls and the lazy smile at the corner of his mouth that positively screamed "just as planned."
"Tch, that system might not be reliable most of the time, and it occasionally gets a little muddled over its 'principles,' but the 'friendly hints' it gives at crucial moments really are something." Shinichi rubbed his chin. His perpetually half-lidded, dead-fish eyes now gleamed with the precision of a searching radar.
He certainly wasn't foolish enough to believe that some natural phenomenon involving "unstable spatial structures and extradimensional energy leakage" had really occurred in the Land of Hot Water.
Residual effects from the battle? What a joke. Uchiha Shinichi's battles had always been about "plucking every passing goose bare and leaving not a blade of grass standing"... no, scratch that, "precision strikes without wasting a single drop of chakra." How could he possibly have left such obvious loose ends?
Clearly, that supposedly upright and trustworthy system was pointing him in the right direction in a way it considered "within regulations and consistent with its principles"!
The power of the Dragon Veins really is convenient... Shinichi marveled silently.
He sank part of his awareness into his body, drawing on the