Instead of treating this recollection like a casual conversation, Rin recounted the events quietly as they marched.
Arthur's journey didn't stop after he brought her back from the dead. If anything, it reminded him of how his spiritual energy was weak. A standard ninja would meditate for years to fix that gap. But he didn't have years.
Rin described the weeks he spent locked inside his laboratory as he conducted experiments on his own body by utilizing procedures that would have killed anyone else. He had built a vat, filled it with concentrated chemicals, and submerged himself.
Days were spent with him in that toxic soup. When he finally broke the hatch and stepped out, Rin hadn't recognized him. His chakra signature was denser, and he had forced his biology to adapt to the spiritual pressure within him.
"I couldn't contain myself after that," Rin admitted to the others.
"How did he survive that?" Shigeru asked in shock.
"I don't know… He's always done things like that."
Rin continued to recall the events that followed.
Arthur needed to test this new resilience, so he went straight to the Sound Village and secretly healed Kimimaro's rotting cells.
When Kimimaro woke up breathing normally, Orochimaru and Kabuto were surprised. They believed Kabuto's experimental medicine had finally worked. But Orochimaru had no more use for Kimimaro. The snake already had his sights set on Sasuke.
So, Orochimaru sent the cured Kimimaro to the northern hideout because someone unknown had infiltrated that sector. Little did either of them know, the entire thing was a setup planned by Arthur.
Jugo, who was there, was thrilled to see his one and only friend in optimal condition. Kimimaro himself was ready to help Jugo after his mission. That is until Arthur stepped out of the shadows and challenged Kimimaro.
The Kaguya fought with everything he had, but Arthur defeated him with ease.
Back at the Sound Village, Orochimaru lost contact. He was only mildly troubled, simply assuming Kimimaro was only showing temporary signs of being healed before he finally succumbed to his sickness.
But Arthur took him to the Cayman Jungles for rehabilitation.
There was a problem with that since Kimimaro was fanatically loyal to Orochimaru.
Rin explained how Arthur broke him. He removed the curse mark from Kimimaro's chest, killed him, revived him, killed him, revived him, killed him, revived him—over and over until the concept of reality was fractured in his mind.
Then Arthur finished things by using the Evil Illusion Flattery technique to reprogram his will. Kimimaro belonged to him now.
With his spiritual energy balanced and his strength having skyrocketed, Arthur shifted his focus to the dead bodies of the other Sound Four members.
So, through his network of Flying raijin marks, he discovered that Alice and her group of Leaf shinobi were transporting three of their corpses to Blood Prison, where they were going to analyze Orochimaru's curse mark seals.
Arthur had no intention of letting the Leaf take his assets.
He donned his Kaito disguise and ambushed Alice's escort team on the road.
The fight was violent as Alice revealed her true power of telekinesis. But Arthur was different now. He defeated her via his new transformation, called Angelic Mode. It was a state of pure chakra harmonized into his newly modified body.
Using it, he defeated her at her own game. He was ready to turn her into a mental vegetable until Margaret intervened by appearing out of thin air by traveling through time.
Arthur was baffled. He understood spatial manipulation, but temporal shifting was a different breed of anomaly.
He wanted no part in confronting such a technique without knowing the rules governing it. So he teleported away to watch from a safer distance.
Over the next few weeks, he monitored their movements and discovered Jasper was the one truly responsible for utilizing the Time Travel technique.
Arthur knew he had to be prepared for any more convoluted abilities like that. Things had shifted so much that he now needed something new.
So he took money he acquired from Diana in the Land of Money and entered the civilian stock market. In record time, he made her the world's richest woman, entirely dependent on his financial strategies.
Using those insider funds, he constructed a private anti-gravity training room. It was a chamber lined with industrial magnets and pressure seals that were found on the black market.
Inside, he trained there for weeks—the type of training that not even veteran shinobi could withstand.
Such intense progress came to a halt when a core magnet cracked under the strain. The machine had died, and the only material in the world capable of replacing that specific magnet core existed in the Leaf Village's science building.
Arthur had come to hate venturing to that village. It was a hornet's nest of variables and enemies. But he had no choice.
He teleported there as usual and moved quietly to the area. To his surprise, he was immediately sensed by Alice. Arthur sensed her, too, and almost choked her to death had she not pleaded.
Alice, who was undoubtedly the Leaf's great sensor, revealed that she had not come there to fight. It was there in private that she also stated she knew the truth of not only him being alive but also that he was in fact Kaito. She even went as far as to reveal that she was a double agent, and chose not to reveal Arthur's status because she knew he was different.
Expecting his help in her own mission, he refused. If she wanted his loyalty, she had to pay a price. So he told her to deliver Naruto Uzumaki into his hands. Alice hesitated, but she agreed on account that she valued others more than the main character.
The next day, she managed to lure Naruto outside the village under the guise of a fake restaurant mission. Arthur therefore ambushed him in a clearing at night, transformed as John.
Naruto was fast and hit hard thanks to the Nine-Tails chakra. But Arthur dismantled his guard, broke his ribs, and dropped him into the dirt. The boy had lost.
Defeating Naruto was easy for Arthur on account that he always kept monitoring the boy's progress through the Flying raijin chip he had previously buried in William's body—the main person who was always with the boy.
Before the final blow landed, the tree line exploded with an incoming brigade of Hyūgas, led by Kakashi, Hinata, and Margaret.
Arthur, standing over the boy, had a choice: fight an army of Byakugan users, an otherworldly ninja, and the Copy Ninja, or spare the boy. He chose to spare him.
But he didn't leave empty-handed. In that moment before being chased out the country by Kakashi, he had planted a hidden curse mark directly inside the Eight Trigrams Seal holding the fox.
When Arthur returned to his hideaway, his goal to increase his strength hadn't changed once he fixed the machine to the gravity room.
Then came the practice of diversifying his ice style Kekkei Genkai. So he ventured to the Land of Snow to train in a natural environment. But when he arrived, he found the landscape completely altered.
Thanks to Alexander, he had liberated the country, reverting it back to the Land of Springs.
Such a political shift annoyed Arthur because the others were constantly trying to change the narrative. If they kept doing that, he would barely know how to progress.
As such, he decided he needed a weapon to combat his foes in case an unforeseen situation arose. Something that didn't rely on blunt force or chakra drains.
To create such a weapon, he needed to use all of his valuable resources from his laboratory.
First, he took his collection of swords and dismantled them to study their chakra conductivity. Then he used his machines to fuse blood cells from various sources together. The synthesized compound was finally directly injected into the folded steel of a new blade: The Blade of Chaos.
That was how his ultimate weapon came into existence. A single cut carried enough poison to stop a heart in seconds.
All he needed to do next was test it with live targets.
So he donned his Kaito disguise and tracked down the Sand Siblings. A fight ensued, in which Gaara, Temari, and Kankuro were clearly a well-coordinated team.
Temari kept him at bay with wind scythes, Kankuro used his puppets to lay traps, and Gaara manipulated the sand to crush him. But Arthur slipped through their defense, allowing the Blade of Chaos to do the rest.
By the end of things, they inevitably fell to the sword's might.
Arthur, not wanting to kill them, used that exact instant to fake Kaito's death under Gaara's Destructive Sand Burial technique.
This caused the shinobi world to keep quiet about his existence. The less they looked for him, the better.
Now, because he had fought Gaara closely, he managed to collect a vial of the Jinchūriki's blood.
The plan was to acquire the highly coveted Magnet Release for its absolute defense.
But when he returned to his lab and injected himself, it became a fatal mistake. His body was an enhanced one, and it was already holding the smoke release, the ice release, the visual prowess, and the Uzumaki chains.
Such genetic structure had stretched him to the limit, and the moment Gaara's blood entered his system, his body convulsed as he coughed up sand mixed with blood.
Arthur was not a god. He was a man constantly pushing himself past his redline, willing to endure any amount of pain to control the board.