After all, even if he set his own group aside, Kimimaro knew Konoha was about to drown in problems.
Plot-wise, the village was already marching straight into one disaster after another in the coming years.
And with the ripple effects he'd caused today spreading outward, those dangers could even likely hit sooner or harder than in the original timeline.
Canon had been bent.
Pressure accumulated differently now.
And externally wasn't even the real issue.
Internally, Danzo was still there.
That alone should have terrified them.
Kimimaro himself didn't care.
Danzo, to him, was just a slightly larger ant.
His political games, his paranoia, his scheming, none of it truly concerned him.
But there was someone who couldn't afford that luxury.
Tsunade.
The soon-to-be crowned Fifth Hokage.
Danzo was no longer the complacent shadow he'd been in the original story.
What he'd witnessed today would have sharpened him, made him urgent, aggressive.
There was no guarantee he would wait for something as formal as a Five Kage Summit to start carving power away from her.
And he possessed Kotoamatsukami.
The perfect tool for political surgery.
Just because he'd barely used it in the original timeline, whether due to complacency or narrative convenience, didn't mean he would hold back here.
This was a real world, and Danzo had just been reminded how fragile his position truly was.
Kimimaro had no doubt he would act.
And Tsunade, for all her strength, was ill-suited to face him.
Too straightforward. Too honest.
She hit problems head-on, with fists and resolve, not layers of traps and deniability.
Against Danzo, that made her vulnerable. Politically especially.
Even an improved Jiraiya might not be enough to shield her forever in Konoha.
Which meant that sooner or later, Tsunade would have to come to him once he made his presence known and available to her.
Maybe not openly. Maybe not willingly. But in some form.
Kimimaro was almost certain of it.
When that moment came, he would already be ready.
As for what remained of Konoha's leadership, the picture was almost laughable.
The two other elders, their names barely worth remembering, were dead weight. Loud in council, empty in substance.
Whatever authority they held existed only because no one had bothered to remove them yet.
The real threat, the last meaningful piece on the board, was still Danzo.
Not because of raw strength, but because of overall power.
Someone like Jiraiya had neither the interest nor the instinct for influence and factional games.
He fought enemies, not systems.
Which was exactly why Tsunade had been the compromise candidate in the original timeline.
Danzo had been slow.
Hesitant.
Comfortable in the shadows.
He had assumed she would never agree.
Then loud-mouth Naruto happened.
In this timeline, however, that outcome wasn't guaranteed.
Danzo might not wait.
He could move before Tsunade returned, quietly securing control over the remaining elders, with or without Kotoamatsukami.
Or he might let her come back, only to strangle her authority piece by piece the moment she sat down.
What restrained him wasn't lack of ambition.
It was optics.
His personal strength was unimpressive in the eyes of the village.
In truth, he had very little visible track record at all, since almost everything he'd ever done had been buried in shadows and dirty work.
And among those who truly knew him, he embodied everything rotten at the core of the shinobi system.
His reputation was pure poison, especially in a village as heavily ideological and self-righteous as Konoha.
The clans despised him. He had spent decades poaching their children under coercion, waving banners of patriotism and necessity while hollowing them out.
Kimimaro couldn't imagine someone like Shikaku Nara ever genuinely following Danzo.
Which meant both sides had strengths and crippling weaknesses.
Danzo possessed Kotoamatsukami and the most organized remaining force in the village. The root was intact. ANBU, technically leaderless now, had taken heavier losses during the invasion, not by accident either. Danzo had made sure of that.
But he lacked legitimacy.
No widespread support among civilians. No trust from shinobi. No loyalty from the large clans either.
A direct takeover would fracture the village.
What loomed instead was a prolonged struggle.
A cold war fought through councils, shadows, accusations, and quiet removals.
A battle neither side could win quickly.
Perfect.
Exactly the kind of instability Kimimaro needed to create leverage over Tsunade.
The only uncertainty was the opening distribution of power.
How much Danzo would seize in the vacuum before Tsunade returned.
Who would formally occupy the Hokage chair in the interim?
How skewed the board would be by the time she arrived.
That unknown bothered him.
Which was why Kimimaro filed the thought away carefully.
Once he refined the technique further, sending a Shadow Clone to linger near Konoha might not be such a bad idea after all.
Kimimaro also knew there was no real protocol for choosing a Hokage, which made predicting the outcome nearly pointless.
Tobirama had once justified denying Madara the seat by calling it a "democratic process."
An impressive claim, considering he later pointed at Hiruzen, appointed him on the spot, and died in a forest moments later.
No vote. No council. No debate.
Just a finger and a dying man's authority.
Some democracy indeed.
In reality, Hokage selection followed the same rule as everything else in this world.
Whoever had the strongest fist, the loudest backing, or the most convenient narrative at the time got the chair.
Ideals were discussed afterward, once the outcome was already settled.
Konoha liked to dress it up as a choice.
But Kimimaro had seen enough history to recognize it for what it really was.
'Actually… a lot of things in Konoha might start getting decided by my friends in the Hyūga clan next...' Kimimaro thought amusedly.
Setting aside the potential Eight Gates suicidal Guy, Hiashi Hyūga had just demonstrated the highest frontal force in the entire village.
Borrowed power or not, it didn't matter.
What mattered was what everyone had seen.
Pressure that bent space inward.
Destruction folded and contained.
Authority made tangible.
That kind of display didn't just invite respect.
It invited hunger.
Covetous eyes. Political gravity.
The sort of attention that reshaped a clan's entire position overnight.
Navigating that would be far harder than the Hyūga's old, careful existence on the coast of village politics, powerful but deliberately quiet.
They had effectively become the new Uchiha in a single afternoon.
The only reason they weren't already on the menu was timing.
Konoha was in chaos. Leadership fractured. Loyalties unsettled.
If the village had been stable, the Hyūga would be under scrutiny, pressure, and containment from basically tomorrow.
Kimimaro knew the clan's history well enough.
They had survived precisely because they avoided confrontation.
They endured by folding inward, by ritual, hierarchy, and restraint.
But now?
Now the village had seen their fangs.
And once that happened, pretending to be harmless was no longer an option.
Anyway, Kimimaro let Konoha fade from his mind and turned to something far more relevant.
His own future.
The highest-ranked stolen jutsu were next.
They would need to be mastered or extracted for insights, either by him or by the girls, refined until they became instinct rather than theory.
The ten fresh Byakugan sealed in his scroll couldn't remain inert either.
They would have to be fused gradually, carefully, most into his own eyes and some into Emi's, layer by layer, without destabilizing what already existed, in hopes of awakening something even greater in each of them eventually.
Then there was the newfound 'overflowing' ritual essence sacrificial material that Reika managed to seal this time.
Not scraps taken from some backwater like Yugakure, but the condensed remains of countless shinobi from the strongest village on the continent.
That power needed refinement, structure, and purpose.
It would fuel the cult's greater-than-ever expansion, and more importantly, Saya's body.
With this quality of essence, her immortality might finally cross the line from imitation into something closer to Hidan's true condition.
Captured Guruguru also couldn't be left idle, either.
Experimentation had to begin immediately.
For finally figuring out the safe transplantation method of Hashirama's cells, for himself and for Akane.
And once perfected, that same vessel would also serve as a placeholder for something even more important.
Ashina.
The resurrection process would have to be rebuilt from the ground up, refined to absolute precision.
Done correctly, it wouldn't just return a mentor, but potentially restore a Six Paths–class ally.
Someone who could stand beside him when the world's real monsters finally emerged.
Moreover, he was already preparing the groundwork for Kirigakure and the Land of Water to become the cult's next true base as he always planned, moving in step with the opening Obito himself would create.
Given what he knew of the timeline, the village would soon enter a vulnerable stretch, a quiet interval where it would be ripe for claiming rather than conquering.
Against that future, the Land of Hot Water now felt like what it had always been meant to be, a temporary shelter and nothing more, a crude starting point he had long since outgrown.
After all, Kimimaro's ambition in this world was never limited to personal strength alone. He sought power in every sense of the word.
Shinobi techniques were simply the most efficient language through which that power could be expressed, not its only form.
If that weren't the case, he wouldn't have spent so long cultivating what looked like a backwater cult in the first place.
From the beginning, it was meant to be a launchpad. His ultimate aim was to become something without equal, and that goal never excluded conquest, it complemented it.
So, yes. His hands would be full in general in near term.
And now that they were fully exposed, security would need to tighten across the cult.
Sooner or later, someone would likely connect the dots.
The leadership of the Hot Water Jashinists was responsible for the attack on Konoha.
It was not some insignificant cult.
Preparation would have to accelerate.
They would have to be ready to face anyone, from any direction, without flinching.
But Kimimaro didn't feel burdened by it.
This wasn't chaos.
It was a staircase revealing its next step.