Kimimaro spent some time wandering the town, quietly listening, asking careful questions, and watching.
But, eventually, a child traveling alone, good-looking enough to draw stares, was bound to attract pests, wannabe traffickers, thugs looking for coin, or just idiots sniffing for weakness.
This wasn't exactly a world of "law and order."
But all it took was one look.
A single, deliberate glance from him, and most of those insects scattered.
Kimimaro understood why.
His bloodline was already powerful, his strength at least low chūnin, and he had just added his first real kills to his aura.
Additionally, he had been honing his sensory instincts.
What leaked out of him now wasn't simply a glare. It was "killing intent".
He remembered it from the series, Orochimaru using it to press and paralyze Sasuke.
That was no trick of imagination or cowardice.
Killing intent was real, a phenomenon somewhere between sensory technique and genjutsu.
You push a pulse of chakra outward, not unlike sensing, then lace it with faint traces of something darker, tiny tinges of yin release woven into the current, stamped with the raw imprint of murderous will.
Of course, no one thinks about it in terms of "yin release." Not at this stage.
It isn't a jutsu you learn, it isn't theory from a scroll. It's instinct.
You either have it or not, depending on your strength, kill count, level of sensory and yin release (spiritual) talent.
Some call it pressure, some call it bloodlust.
In reality, it is your will stabbing into theirs.
It crawls into the limbic brain, hijacks instinct, and shuts people down.
Civilians freeze. Their tongues lock. Their bodies forget how to move. Fear makes them obedient.
Of course, Kimimaro wasn't delusional.
At his current overall strength, he doubted he could paralyze even a trained genin yet.
But against ordinary townsfolk, it was overwhelming. Enough to scatter flies and silence whispers.
So, he used that edge to gather the necessary information and secure a few supplies he needed next.
No threats, no arguments, no negotiations.
Fear was irrational, but precisely because it was irrational, it worked best.
None of them would dare spread rumors about the strange boy with emerald eyes.
Who would risk attracting his gaze again?
Kimimaro walked on, content.
In this world, blades were sharp, but fear was sharper.
Eventually, Kimimaro secured another vessel.
This time, it was a proper boat of decent quality, a merchant's property, "borrowed" under the cover of night.
His superior speed and silence made the theft laughably easy.
Compared to shinobi, these so-called guards were livestock, pigs dressed as men.
By the time they even registered movement, the boat was already drifting away.
He hadn't stopped there.
Better maps were necessary, so he stole those beforehand, too, straight from the home of a local magistrate.
The man's household had guards, of course, but it hardly mattered.
A few of them had to be pierced through quietly when they stood in the way, their lives extinguished before they even realized a child's bone could split flesh cleaner than steel.
The magistrate himself never knew how close he had come to death that night.
Kimimaro left no traces, made sure his identity remained hidden.
Rumors of a strange boy wielding bones couldn't be allowed to spread, not yet, not while Konoha's ears might be listening.
Now, in the silence of the open sea, he guided his new boat toward the forgotten ruins of Uzushiogakure.
The night was moonless, the waters restless, but he was not afraid.
His hands gripped the tiller, his eyes scanning the horizon, and the stolen map sat folded neatly at his side.
He recalled navigation principles both from memory and instinct, stars above, currents below, the shapes of islands dotting the archipelago like silent watchmen.
The sea was dark, but to him, it was no abyss. His willpower illuminated it, burning steady like a torch within.
He wasn't drifting blindly.
Kimimaro rowed through the night, the oars biting into black water until the first gray of dawn revealed land ahead.
The Land of Whirlpools.
Once, this island had been unique in the shinobi world.
Unlike every other country, it was ruled directly by its shinobi village.
No separation between daimyo and ninja, no tug-of-war between politicians and mercenaries.
The Uzumaki clan stood at the center, like a royal family, with perhaps only one or two thousand people, their bloodline only a small fraction of the island's tens of thousands, if not more, but strong enough, clever enough, and productive enough to hold everything together and spread that prosperity.
For centuries, they had lived that way.
The Uzumaki weren't marauders like the Kaguya, nor mercenaries like most shinobi.
They built their wealth through seals, through medicine, through agriculture, and through fishing.
Their strength wasn't stolen from raids, but grown patiently out of knowledge and institutions.
With their sealing arts, sensory abilities, and barrier ninjutsu, they fortified their territory, kept their island and prosperity secure, and supplied the wider world, not only the shinobi, with useful fuinjutsu, gadgets, tools, and wards.
A peaceful power, but no less dangerous for it.
But then Konoha was founded, and the balance cracked.
The "one country, one hidden village" system spread like a plague.
The five great nations rose, and the newly founded or simply finally named Uzushiogakure village, led by and orbiting around the Uzumaki, found itself surrounded by much larger countries and stronger villages.
Their only mistake was choosing a side.
They allied with Konoha — cousins, marriage bonds, old ties.
At first, it must have seemed like security. In truth, it was a leash.
Konoha happily took the Uzumaki's seals, exclusive and/or cheap.
And the other four great nations noticed.
So, before the Second Shinobi War, they struck first.
They didn't want to risk Uzumaki seals becoming a factor against them during the next war.
They ganged up, burned Uzushiogakure, and butchered the clan that had once been the oldest sedentary shinobi in history.
Kimimaro thought about it as if running a mini thought experiment. "Who's really to blame?"
Konoha? Of course, from a "moral" standpoint, their hypocrisy was obvious.
They used the Uzumaki, then abandoned them. Realpolitik at its coldest.
But the Uzumaki weren't without blame either.
For a clan so advanced in their research, how could they be so blind to human nature?
If they had stayed neutral, they could have played the five villages against one another, profited from all sides, and become untouchable.
Instead, they swallowed Konoha's empty rhetoric and paid for it in blood.
A textbook example of stupidity disguised as trust.
Now all that remained was wreckage.
The Land of Whirlpools had never recovered.
Its great central town was ash, its population a tenth of what it once was, scattered into a few fishing villages clinging to survival.
Even its name was being erased, deliberately scrubbed from maps until it became little more than a rumor, a blank spot on the sea.
Kimimaro's boat scraped closer to shore.
After the four great villages descended on Uzushiogakure, it wasn't only the Uzumaki who paid the price.
The entire island had been scarred.
Fighting on that scale couldn't end in a day or two.
It must have dragged for weeks, maybe longer, until the screams bled into the sea and the survivors scattered.
Most ordinary people fled, unwilling to be crushed as collateral.
Those who remained lost their central authority, their leaders, their structure.
What was left behind was little more than fragments.
Small, primitive communities clinging to fishing and scraps of farmland.
The strong had long since taken ships and left, while the ones who stayed were mostly the old, the slow, and the stubborn.
Kimimaro knew where the heart of it must be.
The ruins of Uzushiogakure would lie somewhere in the island's center, once the core of its pride and power.
He didn't bother walking cautiously through villages.
He simply avoided them altogether.
His speed was too great for civilians to even glimpse him, and his sensory range had expanded steadily over the past months.
Faint flickers of life brushed against his perception, each one easy to slip past.
Kimimaro finally reached the ruins.
The heart of Uzushiogakure looked like a carcass left to rot, stone spirals jutting out of the ground, buildings collapsed into the central river.
The place reeked of abandonment.
No guards. No life. Just silence.
Kimimaro slowed his steps, eyes narrowing.
"So this is what's left of the great Uzumaki," he thought.
"Centuries of knowledge, erased like scribbles in the sand."
He crouched near a cracked column around something most resembling an "entrance", fingers brushing over the faded spiral carved into its surface.
Time had chewed at it, but the mark still glared faintly, stubborn even in ruin.
The wind whistled through hollow ruins, carrying nothing but echoes.
Kimimaro rose again, calm, detached.
He wasn't here to mourn. He wasn't here to honor.
"If you died because you were weak-minded, then your secrets belong to me now."
He continued deeper inside, heading for the center of the ruins.