The Border of the Land of Wind.
The vast, endless sea of sand had lost the scorching heat of the day in the deep night, leaving behind only bone-chilling cold. Moonlight fell like salt frost on the undulating dunes, dyeing them a lifeless gray.
The fierce wind howled, whipping up clouds of sand and dust, making visibility extremely low. The entire world seemed reduced to the roar of the sandstorm and boundless silence.
In this harsh environment, a streak of golden light was skimming low over the dunes at an astonishing speed, tearing through the gale and racing toward the Sunagakure Village.
"Damn it, why hasn't a single message come back?"
Rasa knelt on a floating cloud of Gold Dust. His face, usually cold and composed, was now etched with unprecedented gravity and undisguised anxiety.
After learning of the potential threat from Hyūga Kawa in Konoha, he had immediately dispatched his fastest communication ninja beast to send a warning and the news of his return to the village.
However, as time ticked by, the expected reply from the village was gravely overdue.
A powerful, ominous feeling gripped Rasa's heart like a venomous snake.
Under normal circumstances, even if the village were under attack, it should be impossible for not a single communication ninja beast to break through the encirclement and deliver information.
Unless...
Rasa forced himself not to think further, concentrating on controlling the Gold Dust, but his inner unrest intensified like the surrounding sandstorm.
He instinctively glanced at the two corpses beside him, also held aloft by the Gold Dust. They were already cold and stiff, covered in a thin layer of sand.
These were the bodies of Maki and Yura.
Looking at their lifeless faces, a profound agony crossed Rasa's eyes.
These two were among the few elites of Sunagakure's new generation who possessed strength, excellent strategizing, and resolute will. They were pillars of the village and core figures on whom he had placed great hope.
Their deaths, for a Sunagakure already suffering from a lack of talent, were undoubtedly a blow on top of an injury—a crushing weight that made Rasa's heart ache intensely.
If possible, he desperately wanted to bring their remains back to the village intact.
But...
Rasa averted his gaze from the corpses, looking toward the seemingly endless sea of sand, and finally let out a heavy, helpless sigh.
"Forgive me, Maki, Yura."
He murmured softly, no longer maintaining the cloud of Gold Dust that was supporting the two bodies.
Deprived of the Gold Dust's support, Maki and Yura's bodies plummeted from the air, cruelly swallowed by the shifting sands below, vanishing into the merciless gray-white without a trace.
The Magnet Release he possessed was fundamentally similar to the principles used by the Third Kazekage to control Iron Sand and Kumogakure's Troy to control ninja tools—all involved magnetizing and manipulating specific substances.
However, due to differences in their chakra reserves, environmental needs, and personal choices, the three had taken fundamentally different paths.
Troy, with relatively limited chakra, chose to control lighter, more manageable specialized ninja tools, excelling in surprise attacks and precise strikes.
The Third Kazekage's Iron Sand possessed both hardness and numerical superiority, being effective for both offense and defense, making it supremely versatile—hence his title as the "Strongest Kazekage."
As for Rasa, with the sudden death of the Third Kazekage and the vacancy of the Kazekage position, he immediately recognized the dire financial and resource shortages facing Sunagakure.
To secure the position, he chose an unconventional path: manipulating Gold Dust, which was of higher value but also denser, heavier, and required far more chakra per unit to control than Iron Sand.
This decision allowed him to defeat the heroic Yondaime-candidate Pakura and others, securing the support needed to become the Fourth Kazekage.
However, in terms of sheer speed and sustained output for long-distance travel, the dense Gold Dust was undoubtedly a disadvantage, forcing him to abandon the burden of the two bodies.
Feeling the Gold Dust cloud lighten considerably, the pressure on Rasa's continuous chakra output suddenly decreased.
"Faster! I must be faster!"
Rasa almost spat the words out through his clenched teeth, his voice unusually deep and hoarse from the wind-whipped sand and his anxiety.
He pressed both palms onto the surface of the slightly vibrating Gold Dust cloud, pouring his already depleted chakra into it without reservation!
Oomph!
The Gold Dust cloud beneath his feet hummed. Its speed instantly broke its limit again, leaving a streaking, luminous wake that was quickly swallowed and erased by the sandstorm.
The dunes on either side became completely blurred and warped, transforming into rapidly receding yellow streaks. The wind pressure threatened to rip Rasa right off the cloud.
Adhering his chakra to his feet, he held on desperately to the cloud.
Finally, a faint red glow struggled to emerge on the horizon, which had merged almost completely with the sky.
The night was departing; dawn was arriving.
Using his deeply ingrained memory of this sea of sand, Rasa knew he was very close to the village.
The wind carried sand, cold as a knife, constantly cutting across his cheeks and exposed skin, but he seemed not to notice, his eyes fixed on the distant, sand-obscured front.
His speed gradually slowed. The golden sand cloud lowered its altitude, penetrating layer after layer of the dusky yellow curtain of dust.
However, as the scene before him gradually became clear, Rasa's look of anxiety and worry slowly morphed into one of blank stupefaction.
The racing sand cloud beneath his feet involuntarily stalled, finally hovering a few meters above the ground.
"...What?"
Rasa uttered the single word blankly, his gaze sweeping over the scene before him.
There was no towering Kazekage Building from his memory, no familiar street outlines, and no patrolling ninja figures...
There was nothing.
Only an expanse of boundless sand dunes.
The red glow of dawn, cast upon the dunes, brought no warmth. Instead, it looked like a thin layer of blood clumsily smeared on a canvas, conveying a haunting silence and desolation.
"Where is the village?"
"Where is Sunagakure?"
"Did I lose my way? Did I come to the wrong place?"
The thought flashed through his mind. Rasa controlled the sand cloud to descend slowly.
However, the sensation under his feet was not the solid, stable ground of memory, but a soft, sinking feeling, like stepping onto the lifeless, yielding belly of some enormous creature.
Rasa stumbled, completely losing his balance, and fell backward abruptly.
Poof!
He sank into a soft, fluffy mound of sand, kicking up a large cloud of dust.
"Cough! Cough!" Rasa was violently choked by the sudden dust cloud. His nasal cavity and throat were filled with a complex, strange odor.
It wasn't just the earthy smell of the sand itself; it was mixed with an indescribable scent.
He instinctively braced his hands on either side of him to push himself up, but his palms touched something hard and cold.
Rasa froze, looking down at where his hand rested.
Under his palm, barely poking out from the soft sand, was the corner of a stone with distinctly artificial, sculpted edges.
A sudden, intense sense of familiarity made Rasa's heart pound frantically, urging him to dig through the sand with both hands. Sand instantly packed his fingernails.
As more sand was shoveled away, more of the hard object was revealed.
It wasn't just any stone.
It was a part of a stone monument.
A boundary marker for Sunagakure Village, which should have stood several meters high, solemnly erected at the village entrance!
"..."
Rasa's body went utterly rigid. He slowly lifted his head, his gaze returning to the gigantic sand dune before him.
The reddish glow of dawn was slightly brighter now.
He could finally faintly discern the outline of the dune, the structure vaguely exposed beneath the layers of sand, the shattered edges of buildings barely visible...
It was like a giant who had been buried alive, desperately struggling to push out an arm from the quicksand in a final attempt to call for help, only to have it ultimately drop in defeat.
Silent, yet filled with a soul-chilling despair, helplessness, pain, and terror.
A voice in Rasa's mind was relentlessly telling him: This is the place. The place he was looking for.
This, was Sunagakure.
Yes.
Sunagakure.
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