After digesting the Ryūmyaku's lingering consciousness.
As Lin Ze looked at the little Ryūmyaku dragon inside him, a question he had previously overlooked suddenly flashed through his mind.
"Wait... something's wrong!"
Lin Ze abruptly sat up straight, his brows drawing tightly together.
He remembered that in the original "plot," Minato Namikaze had sealed the Ryūmyaku during his mission in Rōran, and roughly twenty years later, Naruto had traveled through time using the Ryūmyaku and met a young Minato.
"If Minato Namikaze sealed the Ryūmyaku, that means Naruto has already traveled back here!"
"But now I've absorbed the Ryūmyaku! How could the future Naruto have traveled back?"
This was clearly a temporal paradox!
If the past changed, the future would inevitably be overturned along with it.
With the source of the Ryūmyaku gone, Naruto could never make the journey through time.
Lin Ze sat there, deep in thought.
Once every impossibility had been ruled out, whatever answer remained, however incredible, had to be the truth.
"Unless... the world I'm in and the world that 'time-traveling Naruto' came from aren't the same!"
"In other words, at least two parallel worlds exist."
"In my world, I've absorbed the Ryūmyaku, so Naruto can't travel to another parallel world. But in the world 'time-traveling Naruto' came from, the Ryūmyaku remained intact, and Minato successfully sealed it. That's what made the later time-travel incident possible!"
That was right. Lin Ze himself was a transmigrator from another world, so what was so strange about parallel worlds existing?
At that thought, the corners of Lin Ze's mouth curved faintly upward.
"This world is even more interesting than I imagined!"
Upon reaching the Main Island of the Land of Whirlpools, Lin Ze headed straight for the smithy.
The dark-skinned blacksmith immediately recognized the generous customer and hurried to