The sheer strangeness of their psychology in the original timeline, and now this unnatural revival of Shisui, were not the only signs.
There had always been Itachi.
Specifically, the two spiritual weapons bound to his Mangekyo Sharingan and, even more precisely, his Susanoo.
The only such examples among all Uchiha.
The Totsuka Blade and the Yata Mirror.
They were never his personal manifestations.
That much had always been obvious.
Orochimaru knew about them long before fighting Itachi.
He seemingly searched for them in the past.
That meant records, legends, precedent.
Those weapons had existed before Itachi ever touched them.
And who, exactly, could forge spiritual artifacts that broken, artifacts that fused so cleanly with the Sharingan, with Uchiha souls in particular?
Only one answer made sense.
The Sage of Six Paths.
Which raised a far more disturbing possibility.
What if those weapons had been meant for Itachi from the start?
What if Hagoromo himself had guided him to them, nudged him toward them from beyond the world, based on some opaque calculation fed to him by that ancient, suspicious frog friend?
If so, then Itachi wasn't just tragic.
He was curated.
And then there was Shisui's Kotoamatsukami.
Strange. Singular.
Perhaps the most broken ability of all, the absolute apex of genjutsu.
What if it hadn't been born naturally at all?
What if it was born from the same unseen influence, the same subtle, suffocating pressure Hagoromo seemed capable of exerting over him?
A soul always subtly steered by Six Paths–level Yin control, awakening a Sharingan that reflected that domination in kind.
It was another thread added to the knot.
Another reason not to dismiss what he'd seen as a coincidence.
Then there were the monk and the samurai with that strange, anachronistic fighting style. Even without knowing their names, Kimimaro could feel the weight of their chakra. Both were monsters in their own right.
He had always known that before the shinobi age, before Hagoromo had "accidentally" rewritten the world by teaching humans how to refine and weaponize chakra beyond its natural limits, the true powers of the era were monks and samurai.
Before feudal lords began hiring semi-nomadic shinobi clans, they relied on standing armies of loyal samurai, much like the history of Kimimaro's previous world. Disciplined. Trained from youth. Bound to land, lord, and legacy.
And the monks of this world were no simple priests. They were organized powers, closer to miniature feudal states, holding land, influence, and followers of their own. In structure, it mirrored his old world closely.
In substance, it far surpassed it.
Here, everyone possessed an actual soul. Body and soul together produced chakra, complete with real pathways woven into flesh. What those early traditions lacked wasn't power, it was methodology. They didn't yet know how to fully weaponize what flowed through them.
Even so, passive chakra circulation alone granted them immense advantages. Strength, speed, durability, reflexes, mental clarity, resilience, all elevated far beyond anything possible on his old planet.
And Kimimaro strongly suspected that the most dedicated among them had gone further still.
Decades of meditation, discipline, and focused intent likely allowed certain masters to project their will outward, amplifying fists and blades beyond what raw muscle could ever achieve. Intent becoming force. Belief becoming pressure.
He had never dismissed that possibility.
Those traditions hadn't vanished because they were weak. They vanished because shinobi became obscene.
Once Hagoromo's teachings spread, it was the shinobi clans, the mercenaries, the dispossessed, the outcasts, who adapted first. They had no rigid doctrines to protect, no sacred forms to preserve, no moral ceiling.
They twisted chakra into weapons immediately.
Their versatility, hunger, amorality, and absolute willingness to use any method necessary let them outpace monks and samurai almost overnight. Shinobi replaced them because shinobi could do everything they could, and then layers more.
Eventually, the strongest clans settled in the richest, most fertile heart of the world, what would become the Land of Fire, closest to the wealthiest lords of the age.
But that didn't mean the greatest monks or samurai of history would be weak by modern standards.
Only their average members were.
The true masters of the old ages were likely far more dangerous than most people alive now would ever be comfortable admitting.
In any case, Kimimaro knew he wasn't ready to confront the Sage of Six Paths directly. Not yet.
Withdrawing now was the correct move.
He had already taken what he came for.
However, he also knew the reason why he had succeeded so cleanly at that time.
Ashina Uzumaki.
A perfect guide. A living map.
A three-dimensional expertly fuinjutsu locksmith working from inside the system itself. Without him, even hours of effort might not have been enough.
He would have stalled, broken nothing in time, and left empty-handed.
Instead, he walked away with exactly what he needed.
Which meant this retreat wasn't a defeat.
It was timing
Still, he wasn't naïve enough to believe Konoha was finished just because he'd stolen those techniques.
Villages like that never kept everything in one place.
Pride didn't erase paranoia. If all knowledge was centralized, one theft meant ruin, so contingencies were inevitable.
Scattered notes, partial records, and fragments stored across different departments and individuals.
Given time, they could piece much of it back together.
Annoying, but acceptable.
What truly irritated him was the slug summoning contract he didn't find at that time, despite searching for it extensively there.
A missed prize.
That alone could have accelerated his growth to another tier entirely in a relatively short amount of time if successful.
But its absence from Konoha's archives told him enough.
It wasn't communal knowledge. It was more personal.
Either Tsunade had discovered it herself, or it had been passed to her privately, somehow outside the village system itself. Which fit.
After all, all three Sage Regions cared about aptitude and fate to some extent.
The toads perhaps the most openly and comprehensively, but the others followed the same principle at least in terms of choosing successors.
The key to the Shikkotsu Forest was never something you could steal off a shelf.
Not to mention that even the very first step wasn't simple.
It was never enough to just stamp your blood onto Katsuyu's summoning contract and gain the ability to call her.
If you wanted to reach Shikkotsu Forest itself, you also had to make her willing to reverse summon you there herself.
And Katsuyu did likely not open that path lightly.
Kimimaro understood that from the very beginning, the real key had never been a summoning contract scroll.
It was Katsuyu.
Getting your blood on the contract only meant you could call fragments of her.
Reaching Shikkotsu Forest was a different matter entirely.
That required Katsuyu to listen, to judge, and to willingly reverse summon you.
And the most obvious path to that judgment was Tsunade.
There was no clean way around her.
If Kimimaro wanted access to Shikkotsu Forest and the possibility of Slug Sage Mode, then Tsunade was unavoidable.
Not only because she guarded a scroll, but because she was the one Katsuyu trusted. Her summoner. Her chosen human.
Kimimaro knew embarrassingly little about Katsuyu herself.
In the original series, she had barely been characterized.
A soft voice. Polite obedience. Healing. Chakra distribution. Acid when needed.
Occasionally turning massive to bulldoze a battlefield. More utility than personality.
Which meant Tsunade was the only real reference point he had.
So he would act on that.
Tsunade would have to persuade Katsuyu willingly.
Not just to let him enter Shikkotsu Forest, but to speak honestly once he was there. To explain whether Slug Sage Mode truly existed, how it was obtained, what it demanded, what it granted, and what it cost.
Only then could Kimimaro judge whether the risk was acceptable and how to approach it without self-destruction.
And that made Tsunade the true barrier.
Could he kidnap her? Technically, yes. He could probably find her gambling herself into oblivion somewhere, grab her, and threaten Katsuyu through her.
But that idea collapsed the moment he followed it to its end.
What if Shikkotsu Forest housed Katsuyu's true body, not mere fragments?
What if even her largest manifestations in the outside world were likely only pieces?
What if no human had ever simply possessed enough chakra to summon her whole?
After all, just because the three great sage lords rarely showed their power didn't mean they lacked it.
Gamamaru could gaze into the very distant future.
Katsuyu was effectively indestructible, infinitely divisible, and functionally immortal.
From a logical perspective, how could beings chosen directly by the planet's natural energy be weak?
If he tried blackmail, what stopped Katsuyu from simply erasing him the moment he arrived?
One gesture, one pressure he couldn't yet comprehend, and he'd be reduced to nothing.
No.
Tsunade had to open that door willingly.
Not through fear.
Not through force.
Through alignment.
However, that wouldn't be easy.
They were on opposite sides after all.
Even if Tsunade avoided Konoha like a plague during this phase of her life, parts of her had never truly left it.
That village was still stitched into who she was, where she grew up, where her closest bonds had formed, where too many of her dead still lived in memory.
No amount of bitterness erased that, no matter how sharp her tongue became.
And what had Kimimaro just done?
Together with Orochimaru, he had helped turn Konoha into a graveyard.
Thousands of civilians and shinobi dead.
The village humiliated on a scale it had never suffered before.
And on top of that, Hiruzen Sarutobi was gone.
Tsunade's teacher.
Whatever rot had existed inside Hiruzen, Tsunade was unlikely to have seen it the way Orochimaru had.
To her, he had been a man who cared, or at least tried to.
Neutral at worst.
Which meant that, from her perspective, Kimimaro had just cooperated with the man who murdered him.
That alone was enough to make reconciliation laughable.
And canon made it worse.
She was on the verge of returning to Konoha.
About to be dragged back into duty by Naruto's legendary Talk no Jutsu, that terrifying mouth based genjutsu capable of rewriting adult trauma through sheer volume and sincerity.
Once she sat in that chair, Kimimaro would likely climb straight to the top of her personal kill list.
So how did he ever reach alignment with her?
The odds were obscene.
But Kimimaro wasn't entirely hopeless.
Ironically, Tsunade returning to Konoha might actually help him.
It meant she had crawled out of her more nihilistic spiral.
It meant she had something she cared about again.
Something she was responsible for.
A handle.
And Kimimaro had power.
Growing power.
Those two facts could create beautiful leverage.
Not through kidnapping.
Not through threats.
Not through dragging Tsunade into Shikkotsu Forest and daring Katsuyu on her own ground, in her own sage region, where her true body likely rested, and her authority was absolute.
That path ended with Kimimaro being erased for his arrogance.
No, this had to be psychological.
If Tsunade listened to him, even reluctantly, it would be because doing so benefited Konoha.
Or prevented something worse.
Or traded one catastrophe for a controlled one.
Helping against a greater enemy.
Or simply restraining himself, sparing the village further encroachment.
That kind of leverage didn't require chains.
It required choices.
And once Katsuyu understood that killing him in Shikkotsu Forest wouldn't save Konoha, but destabilize it further, things changed.
Removing Kimimaro wouldn't erase his influence.
It would leave four very angry girls behind, fully unleashed, with nothing left to lose and every reason to finish what he started.
At that point, cooperation wasn't mercy.
It was damage control.
Kimimaro almost allowed himself a faint smile at the thought.
He really had grown even sharper. Dangerously so.
Tsunade, in this universe, unwilling to return to Konoha because of the butterfly effect he had indirectly created?
Because she no longer had to face Orochimaru in the same way as in the original timeline, with his arms still perfectly intact?
Kimimaro did not need to worry about that question.
Because Orochimaru's presence cut both ways.
Without him there, Tsunade might have returned far sooner, almost immediately.
The real delay came from Orochimaru himself, in fact, from that dangling promise of Nawaki and Dan, and from her own stubborn urge to eventually ambush him on her own terms and settle the score properly.
That hesitation was a habit more than conviction.
Naruto saving her, in the end, was just the finishing touch.
Her heart had already turned back toward Konoha long before she was willing to admit it.
Naruto's previous words, his progress, his reckless sincerity, the way he carried his dream without compromise, all of it pressed directly on old scars.
Too directly.
The resemblance to Nawaki, his face, his grin, his stubborn refusal to give up, was impossible to ignore.
So Kimimaro did not doubt the outcome.
The blond-haired walking therapy would probably deliver once again.