Six years.
Six full years of restraint and lying low were enough to drive a vicious, wildly ambitious rogue ninja to the brink of insanity.
Six years earlier, the devastating rampage of the dragon veins at Rōran's altar had overturned space and time. The all-engulfing chakra turbulence had forcibly dragged him from the future to more than twenty years in the past.
From the second he landed, Mukade's life had become a constant walk on thin ice.
He hadn't dared relax for a second or reveal even a fraction of his ambition.
Because he understood one thing better than anyone.
The dragon veins' spacetime turbulence hadn't swept up only him.
Miki Yūya, Naruto, and all those monsters from Konoha had been within the blast's range.
No one could say whether, in the very next second, those people might follow the same spacetime trajectory and enter this era.
If they caught up with him, he was dead.
Dead for sure.
To survive, he had completely abandoned the name "Mukade," infamous throughout Sunagakure as that of a rogue ninja, and painstakingly fabricated a brand-new identity: Anrokuzan, a "gentle, cultured, diligent, and loyal" man.
From then on, there was no rogue ninja Mukade of Sunagakure. There was only Anrokuzan, Rōran's regent.
He had forced himself to become an entirely different person.
He reined in his venom, suppressed his murderous urges, and concealed every trace of the killing intent behind his Puppet Technique. Gone was his old, frenzied, anything-goes approach as a rogue ninja. With lowered eyes and a deferential manner, he lived more like a loyal minister than anyone else.
As Mukade saw it, he didn't just need to hide from Miki Yūya. He had to evade two sides, scraping by on both fronts.
Rōran lay on the edge of the Land of