"Speaking of which, does the Land of Waves have a daimyo?" Makoto suddenly thought of a potential loose end.
Tazuna had already run off to handle official business, so Makoto casually asked one of the villagers who had been left behind to attend to them.
"It seems there used to be one," the elderly villager recalled, scratching his head.
"So that means there isn't one now?"
"No. He died years ago, and no successor was ever appointed."
"That saves a lot of trouble," Makoto muttered.
He had been planning to "clean house" before heading to the Land of Water.
Daimyo were pests—useless yet politically annoying.
If the Land of Waves had one, Makoto would have had to remove him to ensure the new ninja village could operate without interference.
Turns out, the Land of Waves was currently a headless state.
No wonder a black market thug like Gato could control the entire country's lifeline.
In a vacuum of power, even a rat can be king.
It wasn't unusual for small countries to lose their leaders and fall into chaos. Take the Land of Rice, where Orochimaru established the Hidden Sound Village.
Orochimaru's bounty later included the hilarious charge of "Bribing the Land of Rice Daimyo to establish a village, then occupying the country."
The fact that the charge was "bribery" rather than "conquest" showed just how pathetic and humble the Daimyo of Rice really was.
....
Two days later.
Makoto's group arrived at the coast of the Land of Water by boat.
"Hidden Mist Village, Hidden Mist Village... I thought this would be a fog-shrouded hellscape like Pandaria," Makoto stretched lazily as he stepped off the boat onto the sand. "The environment here is actually quite nice—sunny beaches, sea breeze. Would make a great tourist destination in peaceful times."
His words were obviously a joke.
Who would dare visit the Hidden Mist right now? It was a damn meat grinder.
You'd get killed by a paranoid hunter-nin just for looking at a tree the wrong way.
Even in the future Boruto era, it took Mei Terumi and Chojuro decades of bloodshed to purge the old guard before the village could even think about tourism.
"Hmm? What a coincidence."
Makoto suddenly stopped stretching and looked toward the distant forest.
At that moment, Itachi, Kisame, and Zabuza had just stepped onto the beach behind him.
"Are they Hidden Mist ninja?"
Itachi followed Makoto's gaze.
It took him a solid ten seconds to detect the chakra signatures in the distance.
'He sensed them long before I did,' Itachi noted internally. 'This confirms it. He must be using Sage Art.'
"Yes," Makoto nodded. "And one of our targets is among them."
Of course, Makoto wasn't sensing anything.
His sensory abilities were slightly above average, sure, but he didn't have a Byakugan.
He couldn't see miles away.
He had simply seen two minutes into the future.
Exactly.
Makoto's ability—Time Erasure—had a passive side effect: foresight.
It had gradually grown from seeing a few seconds ahead to a full two minutes.
This growth wasn't random. Makoto had been actively experimenting on himself.
First of all, Itachi's assumptions about Makoto were wrong.
Makoto did not possess Sage Art.
As a "transmigrator" from another world, Makoto wasn't a soul possessing another body; it was a physical transmigration.
His body had reverted to that of a child, but it was his original body.
And as Makoto had explained to the Akatsuki, chakra didn't exist in humans until Kaguya Otsutsuki arrived with the God Tree.
That meant Makoto, an outsider, had zero chakra.
When he first arrived in the Hidden Leaf, Makoto had sought out Kabuto Yakushi—the director of the orphanage.
He needed Kabuto to take in some war orphans from Amegakure as a cover.
But more importantly, he asked Kabuto to examine his body.
Makoto trusted Kabuto because he knew the man had undergone Izanami. His personality had been corrected; he was loyal, peaceful, and honest.
Kabuto did not disappoint.
He examined Makoto for a day and gave him a strange diagnosis: Makoto had no chakra network, but his body was like an empty vessel perfectly suited for nature energy.
Kabuto taught him a method to absorb natural energy directly, using it as a substitute for chakra.
He didn't elaborate further.
Kabuto was a reformed man; he wasn't going to conduct unethical experiments on a stranger, nor would he share dangerous secrets.
He gave Makoto the basics and sent him on his way.
In the Shinobi World, creating chakra requires balancing physical energy and spiritual energy.
Creating Senjutsu chakra requires balancing physical, spiritual, and natural energy.
Too little natural energy? The jutsu fails.
Too much? You turn into a frog statue.
But Makoto had no chakra to balance against. He just absorbed raw natural energy.
Surprisingly, he experienced no side effects.
No frog transformation, no petrification. It seemed that because there was no internal chakra to conflict with, the natural energy just... sat there.
Stability through purity.
Why "seemed"? Because Makoto himself wasn't entirely sure.
He needed to find Orochimaru.
He needed the Snake Sannin to dissect this phenomenon properly. Until then, everything was just a hypothesis.
For example, Makoto speculated that he gained his time-erasure ability by coming into contact with Otsutsuki tech or energy during the crossing.
But later, he noticed a correlation: when he used the ability, his stored natural energy depleted rapidly.
When he consciously injected natural energy into that specific "void" inside him, the foresight grew stronger.
"Kisame, Zabuza," Makoto turned to the two swordsmen. "You two split off here. Head straight for the capital. Deal with the Daimyo swiftly, then take a boat out. Don't wait for us."
Makoto pointed inland, away from the forest he was staring at.
"Understood," Kisame grinned. "We'll leave the small fry to you."
Kisame and Zabuza vanished into the trees, heading for their assassination gig.
"Itachi," Makoto said after a moment of silence. "We're going to help the group coming toward us."
"Help.... them?" Itachi raised an eyebrow.
"Yes. History is happening right in front of us."
Makoto knew the timeline.
One of the major turning points in the Hidden Mist's history was happening right now: the coup d'état against the Fourth Mizukage, Yagura.
Ao, using a stolen Byakugan, had discovered that Yagura was being controlled by Genjutsu.
He informed Mei Terumi, and the rebel faction decided to act.
They planned to free the Mizukage—or kill him if they couldn't.
But Yagura wasn't just going to sit there and let them dispel the jutsu. The controller (Obito) would fight back.
Makoto just hadn't expected to run into the main event the second they stepped off the boat.
"Let's go," Makoto said, his eyes flashing with anticipation. "We're crashing the party."