The map wasn't on parchment.
It was on skin.
Naruto etched the names into his left arm. Not with ink — with a seal that made the memory permanent. Every location that had betrayed the Uzumaki clan was marked on his flesh. Every general who approved the assault. Every Hidden Village that stayed silent.
His body had become a history book of vengeance.
He wasn't done writing it.
He moved like smoke.
Through forests, along mountain ridges, and into the decaying spines of the countries that once swore allegiance to peace while secretly gutting his family.
This wasn't revenge.
This was preservation.
When the first outpost fell — a base near the border of the Land of Rivers — no one believed it.
Twenty-eight jōnin-level guards, one tactical medic squad, two sensory units.
Gone.
No traces. No chakra residue.
Just a spiral seal burned into the stone.
"He's here."
The whispers started in the smaller nations first.
The Land of Rivers. The edges of the Hidden Mist. Then the mercenary villages. Then the bounty halls.
They called him Ghost King.
Not ninja.
Not demon.
A name.
A myth.
A punishment given form.
In one raid, Naruto slipped through a chakra wall designed to block even S-ranked infiltration units. He didn't fight the guards. He sealed them in place, one by one, until they suffocated in their own chakra pools.
He left the commander alive.
Tied to the ceiling by his own chakra threads.
"Why?" the man had screamed.
Naruto didn't answer.
He never did.
But he burned the Uzumaki seal into the wood below him.
The message was clear:
"This is history catching up."
Kurama didn't speak much these days.
But he was always watching.
"Do you even feel anything when you do this?"
Naruto shrugged inside his own mind.
"I feel quiet."
Kurama didn't push further.
Because sometimes, after a kill, Naruto's hand still trembled — just for a second. Then he clenched it, let it go, and moved on.
By the time he struck the edge of the Land of Water, he was no longer being hunted.
He was being tracked — like a force of nature.
Villages weren't sending assassins.
They were sending scouts to watch him.
To learn how long they had left.
He rarely used the same technique twice.
The seals changed constantly.
He created one that dissolved chakra threads on contact — obliterating puppeteers mid-battle. Another reversed sensory jutsu, sending the user into their own nightmare realm. His chakra chains became a dance of murder and elegance, wrapping around terrain and enemies with surgical grace.
He was sculpting death.
And the world was watching.
One month before he disappeared for the time skip, Naruto stood at the edge of the Northern Border.
The air was thin.
Snow fell in silence.
He looked down at a fortress built where Uzushiogakure's last ally once stood.
It was now a trading post.
For weapons.
"Once," Naruto whispered, "they called us family."
He didn't burn it.
He sealed the entire mountain.
So tightly, so precisely, that even the snow wouldn't fall on it anymore.
It was as if the land had been cut from reality itself.
Kurama blinked.
"That was... excessive."
Naruto closed his eyes.
"No. That was just."