Boruto: Naruto Next Generations‘ latest episode started out innocently enough as it seemed like Boruto and Team 7 were going to go on a mission to discover why birds have been going wild and attacking wildlife around them. But soon enough, they cross paths with Naruto‘s Jugo, who makes his return to the series following his brief cameo in the Sarada arc.
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But Jugo’s return to the series is not without its problems as the series teases he’s currently in the midst of a dark new struggle which has him transforming and going berserk in the same way he used to years before.
When Team 7 along with the members of Team 15 head to a village on the outskirts of Konoha, they come across a few wild birds that have been aggravated into instantly attacking people around them. It’s a pretty deadly experience that soon gets even worse for Boruto as he’s attacked by a fully transformed Jugo later that evening. Though at this point, Boruto does not quite know it’s Jugo’s transformed form just yet.
Later in the episode, Boruto and Sarada come across an unconscious Jugo. Not quite coincidentally, people in the village have started to be infected with curse marks and have gotten ill. Those infected with the curse mark begin to rise and attack much like zombies. Jugo chases off after one of these infected villagers and when Boruto catches up, the villager’s curse mark has disappeared and Jugo tells them to run.
When Boruto and Sarada arrive at a mysterious cave, a struggling Jugo transforms against his will and says he will kill them. This string of events teases a dark new struggle for Jugo as villagers are being infected with curse marks due to his presence. Whatever is happening inside of him, it’s beginning to have an effect on the forest around him.
It’s been revealed that Jugo has the ability to transfer his natural energy to others so there’s a good chance that his berserk Sage Transformation is causing negative energy to infect wildlife and people around him. There’s a hint in the fact that his curse starts activating when the villager’s curse mark disappears, and it could be because Jugo takes this curse into himself.
Hopefully more about Jugo’s curse struggle will be revealed soon as it’s one of the more interesting plots to come in the series for quite a while. Originally created by Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto ran in Shueisha’s Weekly Shonen Jump for 700 chapters. The story follows a young ninja, with a sealed demon within him, that wishes to become the leader of his home village. The sequel, Boruto: Naruto Next Generations is set several years after the events of the original Naruto story and features the children of many of its key characters such as Naruto and Hinata.
