Winter, Konoha Year 9.
That winter was unnaturally cold. The biting wind swept up grains of snow and lashed people's faces like little knives.
But by the time that chill reached Great Britain's "New London," all that remained was a damp mugginess. It was late December, yet the rainforest was still so green it looked almost black. In the daytime sun, even a single layer of clothing felt too hot. Only in the mornings and evenings, when the wind blew in from the sea, was there any hint of a chill.
It was Liuli's first visit.
After stepping through that miraculous "door," she stood stunned by the sight before her for a long while. The towering rainforest, its canopy blotting out the sky; the dense, rank smell of vegetation saturating the air; and that omnipresent sense of something "alive," mingling sweat, earth, smoke, and a faint bloody tang-all of it was utterly different from Konoha's orderly, clean, even somewhat restrained atmosphere.
She watched dark-skinned natives, wearing nothing but animal hides or coarse cloth around their waists, chant work songs as they hauled massive logs and rammed foundations under the shouts of overseers in matching short jackets, long staves in hand. She also saw other people, more neatly dressed and with healthier color in their faces, tending crops in cleared fields or coming and going from newly built workshops belching black smoke. Farther away stood an even shabbier cluster of shacks enclosed by a wooden fence. Figures moved within, but there was little sound beyond the overseers' occasional harsh shouts and the crack of whips through the air.
Hierarchy.
The word struck her mind with extraordinary clarity as she compared the numb eyes in those shacks with the relatively free expressions of the people in the fields.
That feeling only grew