Riverside.
Six-year-old Lin Ze finished his last push-up, stood, and rolled his wrists.
He instinctively turned toward the large tree outside the Orphanage.
There was nothing there at all, but Lin Ze frowned slightly, a trace of puzzlement flickering in his eyes. Just now... he had felt as though something was watching him.
The feeling had been so brief that he was not even sure whether he had imagined it.
"Forget it."
Lin Ze shook his head, thought no more of it, and went on to do squats.
Year 42 of Konoha.
The Land of Wind, the Desert.
The blazing sun hung overhead, and yellow sand filled the sky.
An Azure Dragon over thirty meters long wound through the air, its blue-gold scales reflecting dazzling sunlight. Its deer antlers, ox head, python body, eagle talons, fish tail... every detail exuded the aura of a primordial age.
Below, Toroi, an Elite Jōnin of Sunagakure, stood frozen, his mouth hanging open and his mind utterly blank.
"A dragon... a real dragon?!"
He simply could not believe what he was seeing.
Far away, Fox, her consciousness clouded by severe blood loss, also struggled to lift her eyelids and saw the sacred, majestic figure in the sky.
Just then.
Space suddenly split open a short distance behind Toroi.
Urashiki burst out of the rift, steadied himself, and looked up-
His pupils abruptly contracted.
"What... what the hell is that?!"
Urashiki stared wide-eyed at the Azure Dragon winding through the sky. He had clearly targeted the space-time coordinates of the white-haired man pursuing him at the age of ten, so how had he ended up here?
Urashiki carefully sensed his surroundings, and his expression suddenly changed.
He sensed it. The aura of this Azure Dragon was... exactly the same as that of the white-haired